FREE WILL NEEDS The QUANTUM, To CREATE ORDER OUT OF CHAOS

Abstract: Quantum Physics generates both order and chaos . Quantum Physics is NECESSARY, and sufficient, to generate Free Will (this is a new argument). Reciprocally, we can will the will we want, to some extent, by setting up new Quantum Hilbert spaces inside our minds, according to our will to will whatever we will (new argument too). These new arguments roll both over the dishonest multiverse and traditional lusty, weak willed philosophers such as Schopenhauer.

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Wherever we look at the universe, we see order. For example galactic clusters and white granite splashed by spectacularly blue azurite at the foot of K2, the second tallest mountain on Earth. Yet, (standard) cosmologists claim it all started with chaos. Life is also exquisitely ordered: look at a Scorpion Fish, it’s ready to kill any adversary. Yet its ancestor is supposedly molecular chaos.

At some point, say around 1800 CE, some colossally naive scientists thought enough physics was known to predict everything. (A few years later, between the rise of evolution theory of Lamarck and Cuvier, and the resurfacing of the wave theory of light, and the evidence of the electric and magnetic forces, that naivety discreetly dissipated…) 

Those silly physicists had discovered the following. Given a simple second order differential equation, F = ma, and appropriate initial conditions, one could predict the evolution of some system perfectly, if one supposed it was submitted to just one force, gravity.  Some saw in this physics illustrating the problem of “grace” as in the Christian religion: perfect predestination. 

Henri Poincaré showed that mechanical determinism failed if one considered more than two bodies. In the 1880s, while studying the three-body problem, Henri found that there can be orbits that are nonperiodic, and yet not forever increasing nor approaching a fixed point. And then two other forces (weak and strong) were discovered, and bodies also disappeared, becoming “fields”.

In a fundamentally similar fashion, it has been found that “Three neurons, Free Will“. Moreover, as a single neuron is made of many semi-independent entities, it’s likely that this single neuron itself exhibits what looks like “Free Will”, or, at least, unpredictability.

Quantum Uncertainty makes the detailed evolution of the universe unpredictable: maybe one can predict that strings of super clusters of galaxies will be created, but the quantum molecular chemistry in the brain is unknowable and unpredictable, even if it were known at some point [multiversalism is a infinitely silly theory designed specifically to save determinism in spite of the Quantum; 1]. 

Even if the initial conditions of a Quantum System are fully known, its evolution is unpredictable (see 2-slit). Yet, run through enough times, it generates obvious order! See 2-slit again! Run once, it also generates order, just, it’s less obvious.

Ligand-gated ion channel function. This is how messenger molecules control physical outcomes inside the cell. From Membrane Receptors. My point is that the molecular environment can be changed, at will… And said will is deterministically isolated, to a great extent, thanks to Quantum Uncertainty, a fundamental consequence of the wave nature of reality.

This way we can steer free will, by setting up the nature of the Quantum system. Indeed, we can order around the Quantum ordering mechanisms! We can decide to set-up a 2-slit, or not. We want to will what we want to will, and we can make it so (this is confirmed by the entire story of civilizational progress, and this is the secret of why it happened, even if some hypocrites doubt it ever did) .

Quantum Physics gives Quantum Systems the all-knowing ability to select optimal solutions: an electron will for example find the one and only way to sneak through a potential barrier (as with the chlorophyll molecule). Thus Quantum Systems act in a micro-divine way (this is the deepest secret Quantum). Nobody knows how this works, but it’s a fact (and it’s nonlocal!) For example, entanglement makes it so that a measurement in one locale corresponds to the one then made at a (potentially arbitrarily large) distance (found long after the fact; this has been checked experimentally). 

This magical all-knowing Quantum physics brings the ability to generate large scale order (already obvious in the simplest Quantum Systems, such as the 2-slit), including in biology. Psychological inversion, by setting up the Hilbert Spaces in which Quantum Physics happens, is all we need to go back from those micro-divine Quantum acts to butterflies flapping their wings, causing hurricanes. 

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Let’s be more specific: a monk (say) in Tibet could learn to control (some of) his neurohormones, and thus set-up different Quantum Hilbert Spaces in his brain. This is basically what all specifically trained brains achieve (for example growing their hippocampus). This way consciousness can down-influence Quantum events by changing its ways. 

Any serious, out-of-the-ordinary experience, will change the brain environment, including at the Quantum level, be it only by changing much of the molecular environment. So, by consciously engaging in such brain change, we can change the Quantum Physics in the brain (and often get somewhat predictable effects!)

Ultra-Determinists will object that one’s psychology, my alleged partly free agent, is not really free, but fully predetermined… But there is no full-predetermination, because of Quantum local uncertainty [2]

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OK, let’s dare to flap our wings a bit more. Quantum Physics computes with waves, which use, per their nature, arithmetic advanced enough to be subject to the Incompleteness Theorems of metamathematical logic. In other words, choices are being made, continuously, as required by the Godel Incompleteness construction… Choices correspond to Quantum Collapses (aka “Decoherence”) Are these Quantum events qualia?

Final point: even if one had some sort of Sub Quantum Physics Reality, it would have to be nonlocal… thus non-locally predictable. But, once again, we can consciously organize this whole order-generating casino. So we are on the borderline between free to will the will, and having to suffer the consequences.

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And now, to change my brain’s molecular Quantum Environment, I will go do a hard run in the wild woods, among cliffs, snakes, poison plants, and searing heat… The brutish, but very effective way, to enforced wisdom, and advanced Quantum plenitude…

Patrice Ayme

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[1] The Multiverse was created to save micro determinism in the cheapest way: each time something happens, claim the other thing happened too… In another universe. Thus the general Quantum Process generates an infinity of universes, and, at the smallest nanometer scale an uncountable number of universes would be generated at any picosecond… This is of course ridiculous, as much less grotesque avenues (De Broglie-Bohm, SQPR, Quantum Trajectories) are disponible to understand Quantum Physics by explaining “collapse”.

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[2] Multiversists are careful to avoid the question of entanglement at-a-distance… Because it denies local determinism (from their point of view). Unfortunately for them, the experience of entanglement at a distance has been run without human choice, by letting choices be made by distant light fluctuations… 

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P/S1: The awareness argument can be inverted to “prove” (make plausible) the existence of nonlocal Sub Quantum theories, namely, SQPR, De Broglie-Bohm, Quantum Trajectories… See:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2020/02/15/free-will-shows-quantum-physics-is-incomplete/

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P/S2: The essay above was partly inspired by an excellent article of Mr. Ellis:

https://aeon.co/essays/heres-why-so-many-physicists-are-wrong-about-free-will

But the arguments used by yours truly are much more direct (for example I am not afraid of Quantum Uncertainty; Ellis avoids it, because he says he is scared of the multiversists, who dominate physics presently, and deny uncertainty… Silly ones…)

George Ellis, Templeton Prize, 2004, is the Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Complex Systems in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He co-authored a very famous book, The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time (1973) with Stephen Hawking.

 

FREE WILL SHOWS QUANTUM PHYSICS IS INCOMPLETE

Present Day Quantum Physics Is Entangled With Photon Awareness, While Contradicting Free Will, In A Most Peculiar Way…

Abstract: The Axiomatics of the Copenhagen Interpretation of the Quantum is written as if photons were aware of slits-at-a-distance… And as if photons acted accordingly (as if photons cared about slits!)… But the Copenhagen Interpretation of the Quantum provides NO mechanism for photons to take care of slits. This is absurd in two ways. It’s as if an anthropomorphic Mr. Photon was supposed to be telepathetic. Another problem with the Copenhagen Interpretation of the Quantum (“CIQ”) is that CIQ Quantum Physics, being deterministic, denies Free Will.

Conclusion: Quantum Theory is not the final story. Guiding Wave theories with delayed causality, such as SQPR, are necessary to reduce the nonsense.

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We act, we decide, we initiate actions. Can we insert this faculty for action of our own Free Will, this human agency, into the general picture of nature (“physics”) that we presently have? No! Because physics as we know it is deterministic… And we are not! (Quantum Physics, contrarily to its repute, is deterministic… as long as its nonlocal effects are not considered…) 

Thus the humanity-as-an-independent-agent question leads to the depths of the human mind and its relationship with physical reality, throwing up profound connections to the mysteries of entropy (disorder augments… something biology violates) and the arrow of time (time flowing one way… although fundamental physics flow both ways, contradicting even entropy as fundamental). Even reality gets questioned (what is it?) and consciousness (what could it be?) Surprising answers are readily discernible. 

“Quantum fields don’t have any agency. Atoms don’t, do bacteria?” asks physicist Sean Carroll from the California Institute of Technology. “I don’t know, but human beings do. Somewhere along that continuum it sneaked in.”

Quantum Determinism a la Copenhagen Means We Have No Freedom Of Choice

Well, it is not even as simple as believing “agency” sprouts between things more complicated than atoms and human beings. Let me make a ridiculously simple observation. 

Take the 2 slit exp. This phenomenon is the conceptual heart of Quantum Physics. If we take the Copenhagen Interpretation of the Quantum (CIQ, pronounced “SICK”), at face value, something astounding occurs: it looks as if an electron, or a photon, has AWARENESS. 

Indeed, according to Einstein, a photon in flight is a localized concentrated “quantum” (Einstein wrote about “Lichtquanten”, light quanta; they got named “photons” 20 years later). 

The following is exactly what Albert wrote, in his otherwise beautiful Nobel Prize winning paper on the photoelectric effect, and has been viewed as definitive truth ever since: “Energy, during the propagation of a ray of light, is not continuously distributed over steadily increasing spaces, but it consists of a finite number of energy quanta LOCALIZED AT POINTS IN SPACE, MOVING WITHOUT DIVIDING…” (I view this Einstein unsupported opinion as a grave error which the herd has made ever since… But I am going to proceed, for the sake of argument, as if this ridiculous idea were true, in the next few lines!)

When one cuts two slits in a screen, a photon (going through just one slit, according to Einstein) somehow knows about the other slit. How? Certainly not by having Mr. Photon look over at the other slit. So, then, what is the root, the nature of this photon “awareness”, Einstein and his followers want us to believe in? 

A photon is aware of the other slit: could such an elementary particle’s awareness at a distance be the fundamental “element of consciousness“? (I am sarcastically parroting terminology of Einstein in 1935, introducing the notion of “elements of reality”) 

A shallow philosopher could chuckle that all consciousness comes from sensation, which comes from senses… And obviously the photon has no senses… Except, somehow, according to Einstein and CIQ, the photon (or any fundamental particle) senses the other slit at a distance (always under Einstein’s locality-of-the-quantum hypothesis, which permeates modern physics, a pervading poison gas)… So, according to them, the photon has a sense, somehow. 

Experiments With Bouncing Droplets such as these three above, were started in Paris in the Twenty-First Century. They provide with the first analogy to guide De Broglie’s Pilot Wave Theory of 1927 and the much more sophisticated SQPR… A problem for the Pilot Wave Theories being that we have NO mathematical models… As mathematicians prefer often to focus on silly problems posed by infinities, the modern analogue of the worry an infinite number of sitting angels on pinheads posed to Middle Age Catholic bishops….

“The surface waves generated by the silicon oil droplets above are analogous to quantum mechanical waves that guide the dynamics of quantum particles. While the droplets move like quantum particles, they behave like quantum waves.”… says award winning photographer and physicist Dr Aleks Labuda, who took the picture above.

Guiding Wave (GW) partisans, such as yours truly, don’t have the problem of the telepathic, all aware photon endowed with Free Will: the Guiding Waves go through both slits of the 2 slit experiment, and thereafter “guides” the photon accordingly to the presence of these two slits. (The experimental models of the 2 slits, with bouncing liquid balls, exists… and thus have attracted great hatred from partisans of the Copenhagen Interpretation, such as from the grandson of Niels Bohr, himself a physicist. I will not put links, so as not to confuse readers…)

So, basically, if one rejects a strange photon “awareness”, implicitly assumed by CIQ, one is immediately led to Guiding Waves theories. To this people familiar with the Foundations of Quantum Physics may retort that a GW theory such as De Broglie-Bohm is indistinguishable from CIQ. Right. But I don’t think De Broglie-Bohm Guiding Wave can withstand the EPR 1935. Moreover, my own theory, SQPR, is distinguishable from CIQ: SQPR produces Dark Matter… CIQ doesn’t.

In any case, a GW theory is a mechanical, non local, field of awareness (Bohm makes it into a Quantum Potential). [1]

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With Quantum Physics, we find ourselves back into the ultra-deterministic setting of the Eighteenth Century… But now with a theory which claims to understand everything (whereas in the 18C-19C, some pieces were missing, and not just the two clouds on the horizon  Lord Kelvin saw in the distance…) So the Quantum should explain Consciousness, Free Will… As it explains the universe. But, clearly, it contradicts Free Will… EXCEPT, if one considers nonlocal effects. Nonlocal effects violate local determinism.

The preceding essay stands as a testimony of the usefulness of the philosophical approach to dig deeper into what physics should become in the (hopefully) near future [2]. Not that it was ever different each time physics jumped ahead. All revolutions in physics have been revolutions in philosophy… and the most general revolutions in philosophy often preceded revolutions in physics and science in general [3]. For example, the Renaissance of the Eleventh Century preceded the Buridan (and his schools!) astronomical, physical and mathematical revolution after 1350 CE. In turn it may have accelerated the Fifteenth-Sixteenth Century philosophical Renaissance which clearly led to the Seventeenth Century scientific and technological revolutions, an ambitious protest against more modest understanding.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] One thing that makes SQPR different from De Broglie-Bohm (DBB), is that SQPR supposes the Guiding Field proceeds, expanding or collapsing, at an extremely fast… but NOT infinite… speed. Another is that the Guiding Field carries minute, but non zero mass-energy. Both effects together predict the Dark Matter effect… Also SQPR makes Quantum Entanglement a mass-energy conveyor, hence non-magical, another deviation from both CIQ and DBB…

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[2] Quantum Computers exploit the Foundations of the Quantum… but not through the brute force of Quantum Field Theory and its (glaringly very incomplete and haphazard) “Standard Model” ….the one with no model for Dark Matter or Dark Energy. So Quantum Computers bring the foundations, such as Quantum Entanglement, crucial for their operations, into focus… Hence expect foundations to become ever more crucial in the common Zeitgeist…

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[3] This is particularly blatant reading Descartes, who justified his enormous advances in mathematics with a cocktail of philosophical and psychological observations of the most judicious types. Just as I question infinity, Descartes questioned the sort of proofs mathematicians had been satisfied with for two millennia… and did something about it (by inventing Algebraic Geometry)….

INVICTUS We Should BE: Free Will, Determinism, Classical & Quantum Mechanics, Neurohormonal States

Conventional Wisdom sits back and whines: ’With Quantum Mechanics, we lost determinism. Is Free Will in truth just Quantum chaos?’

Advanced Wisdom replies: ’Not so, just the opposite. Absolute determinacy from classical mechanics never existed, because it depended upon infinitely precise initial conditions. These couldn’t be. Now, given that small initial discrepancy, after an arbitrarily long time, one will get an arbitrarily large discrepancy. Exit your sacrosanct “classical determinacy”, which will always churn out arbitrarily large errors, given enough time.

Conventional Wisdom:’In any case our brains are ruled by Quantum Mechanics, and that’s nondeterministic’.

Advanced Wisdom:’The Quantum is not truly “nondeterministic“. The Quantum attributes probabilities to outcomes, the so-called “Quanta”, but the latter outcomes don’t change ever more with time… whereas wilder and wilder outcomes is what happens in Classical Mechanics, as time goes by!

Classical Wisdom sees Classical Mechanics as deterministic, whereas Quantum Mechanics is not. However, Quantum outcomes are determined at the outset (so-called “Quanta”), whereas all and any classical mechanical evolutions diverge indefinitely ever more… SO CM predicts whatever, in the long run, whereas QM is more regimented…

Conventional Wisdom:’Quantum Mechanics more deterministic than Classical Mechanics? The world is upside down with you! Whatever, you confuse me. Forget these abstractions, forget Quantum Mechanics, for the sake of the argument at hand, I don’t believe in Free Will. Let me tell you why. View the brain as a machine with programs. Given some circumstances, the brain will make just one computation, with just one solution. Presto, no more Free Will! We are just Turing machines! Nothing you can do, you will always get the same result.’

Advanced Wisdom:’I embrace BRAIN BUILDING, not just body building! I have a little experiment for you. Sit in a chair, think about a given Problem, call it P. Then go run half an hour on a mountain trail, an exercise of the muscles, the heart, and the brain processing thousands of data points per second. See what happens to what you thought P was. By the way, I stupidly miscomputed today the firmness of the snow while running, I should have recognized the tint of that particular patch of snow, crashed forward after by right leg went deep through the treacherous white substance, skidded on my left knee, careened off the snow bank, crash landing in stones on the side, making a small bloody gash in my left hand, it sure impacted my mindset a bit… But I digress… The point is this: try then to think of Problem P, while running for quite a while, brain concentrated on potential trajectories’ dangers. You will think of P, but it will turn out in a different context, with different details, different motivations (typically more macroscopic, bigger picture style), in a different mood, in other words, in a different neurohormonal and oxygen set-up. The computational paths offered inside the brain to solve P will be different than those which were apparent while sitting on that chair. Hence if one had a set C of solutions from the chair, one now has a set R, from running: the set of solutions is not C, but C + R!’

In other words, if you want to get out of Plato’s Cave, go running! Running, physical activity, or different neurohormonal set-up, will change your mind. Learn to change minds as if it were clothes. It beats just putting someone’s else shoes.

CW:’What does that have to do with Free Will?’

AW: ‘Classical Free Will is a choice between a number of solutions, hypotheses, emphases, etc. Call that set of choices and outcomes N. Conventional Wisdom assumes that N just is, like the Moon, a well-determined object, like in a category (category is here in the mathematical sense). However, I just demonstrated that N, the set of choices and outcomes presented to Free Will is, itself, a function of neurohormonal states. Changing the neurohormones changes the categories which make up that set N (something Aristotle didn’t think of when he invented categories in the non-math sense). Moreover the latter neurohormonal states can be controlled and chosen from, or selected… At will. When Socrates and his golden youth friends and lovers decided to go get drunk and party all night, chewing the fat, they decided to change their neurohormonal states from normal to wacko. That’s the whole idea of Dionysus, bringing a fresh re-think, and re-emote of the whole mindset. Nietzsche correctly deduced that was one of the causes of the Greeks’ superiority. Similarly, religions prohibiting nuttiness, foolishness, jokes and feasts, as Catholicism and Islamism, fabricate dull minds. So thinking can be controlled with meta controls upon the environments in which the thinking, and the feeling, are conducted, and produced. That’s why people read books and go the theater, among other fantasies.’

Conventional Wisdom: ‘Are you getting meta on me, once again?’

AW: ‘Yes, Free Will is not free of neurohormonal or other mental states, thus we are free to control Free Will by selecting for oneself one’s environments… A form of meta control. For example, when the wrongfully revered philosopher Heidegger decided to become a Seminarist, or a Nazi, he made meta choices which impacted his freedom of thought or, of will, looking forward. Same when doctor Asperger decided to help support the Nazis’ first extermination program, a context which led him to invent the pseudo-disease named after him (and which was used as a reason to assassinate thousands of German children).’    

While in captivity, Nelson Mandela recited that poem by William Henley to fellow prisoners, and they felt empowered. The myth of “Sol Invictus” was imposed by Roman Emperor Aurelian, around 250 CE, it was a first run of the fascist Catholicism Constantine would impose in 325 CE, 75 years later…

CW:’Are you saying that I can act to steer my own Free Will, by controlling my mental context?’

AW:’Yes. And you are deeper than you think: the notion of “steering” was introduced by Schrodinger, in connection with Quantum Entanglement. Steering of mental state and Free Will is closely related. Indeed, changing context is pretty much how Quantum Steering shows up! Hence the Schrodinger cat conundrum…

CW:’Enough, my head is exploding in cats!’

AW:’Take hold of yourself, remember the honor of the human spirit! When talking about Free Will remember that, as in Quantum Mechanics, you can’t control the solutions, but you can control the spaces which make them appear!

CW: ‘Can we get practical here?

AW: ‘It’s very practical! I just said there was Free Will, and how to create more of it!”

CW: ‘You want to create Free Will by acting on the mental contexts, by making it so that they will offer, or create, more solutions?

AW: ‘Exactly! The idea is not exactly new. Forcefully changing neurohormonal states is why Socrates and his ilk got drunk, and Indian Swamis, and countless Shamans around the world experimented with mind altering drugs! Or why we dream, for that matter!’

CW:’Do you do drugs?’

AW:’No need, I just plug-in my brain, it’s foolish and creative enough on its own, no need to reduce performance with junk, no alcohol, nicotine, pot, or hallucinogens for me, I hallucinate in a controlled fashion, so to speak. Indeed, I do mind altering activities like mountain running in snow, hence yesterday’s amusing crash.’  

Conventional Wisdom: Alright, you, you and you. Kudos to you, oh great youyou. What is the point of Free Will anyway? Why should we worry about it?

AW: Because if we don’t we don’t do anything about it, we just wait for nuclear war, and the rising of oceans by 70 meters, whatever comes first.

CW:’You worry about big stuff. What’s in it for small people with small preoccupations?’

AW: ‘Very simple. If one doesn’t believe in Free Will, one is a slave to destiny. However, human beings aren’t made to be slave to destiny. Human beings, as they evolved, over millions of years, could check, every day, that they were actors of change. Profitable change, life saving change. Thus, lack of belief in Free Will is fundamentally inhuman. Lack of belief in Free Will corresponds to not behaving according to the owner’s manual. And it has to be discouraged, thought evolution. Therefore, lack of belief in Free Will makes individuals lugubrious, sinister, unhappy, and a danger to their human environment. Let alone the entire biosphere. Amen.

CW: Being happy is a moral duty?

AW: Being happy and willful is a moral duty, in the sense of the morality evolution itself created us with. We were evolutionary made to be Lords, not slaves! Embracing such an attitude, embracing happiness and wilfulness, has practical consequences, such as an unwillingness to confer our decisional powers to representatives whose powers corrupt them absolutely!

CW: What is the overall metaprinciple, to use your semantics, at work here?

AW: The honor of the human spirit is the ultimate principle. What evolution created us into, it did, because it enhanced our mental performances. We are naturally evolved artificial intelligence. It’s our mental superiority which drove us, as a species. Insinuating that we are not free to be happy, free to become captains, and even architects, and engineers, of our own souls, is to undermine the human spirit, our core principle, it is to subscribe to the principle of slavery.

Patrice Aymé

Consciousness, Nonlocality, Free Will

DS asked in Aeon: “Patrice, in what way is consciousness “nonlocal”, and what is the evidence for this?”

DS: Science  and technique progress, and thus so do our visions of the world. Quantum computers are becoming a reality. Quantum computers work in a completely different way from the classical computers we presently have (which, fundamentally are of the same type as those the Greeks had, more than 2,000 years ago!). Present (2017) versions of Quantum computers are primitive relative to what’s coming (Artificial Consciousness computers). And you know what? Full Quantum computers depend crucially upon nonlocality.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2017/03/14/artificial-consciousness/

Descartes located consciousness (“the soul”) in a tiny part of the brain (the pituitary gland).  I guess because Descartes considered it was the only part of the brain with a unique character, just like the soul is unique to the mind? Now we know the pituitary is just a master neurohormonal center…) 

Philosophers And People of Culture Have to Learn New Words and Especially the Concepts Having to Do With Quantum & Nonlocality. Lest they Become the New Barbarians…

Split brain, and other surgeries have revealed that consciousness can’t be localized that way, inside a tiny organ (whereas short-term memory can be localized, to the hippocampus, fear to the amygdala, vision to 17 areas in the cortex, etc.)

So, in that gross sense, consciousness is non-local.

Next, we are now basically certain that basic biology uses the Quantum (we have a few telling examples already, not just chlorophyll). By this I mean that consciousness uses individual quanta and their nonlocal behavior (for example individual photon, or individual electrons, the latter when, and precisely because, delocalized).

Indeed, what is the most fundamental property of the Quantum? Not just that it is quantified. Nonlocality is the Quantum most important property. The Quantum is quantified because it is nonlocal (Einstein did not understand this his entire life, from 1905 to his death). Nonlocality is the crucial difficulty of Quantum Physics (it shows up as Schrödinger cats, EPR paradox, etc.)

Supposing that the most fundamental thing we know of in the universe, consciousness, can, somehow, avoid the most fundamental physics we have found in the universe, is a form of denial akin to climate denial, or parallel universes. Ignoring Quantum Physics, as a fundamental conceptual tool to understand consciousness can only be explained by prejudice.

What prejudice? Most cultured people have no understanding, let alone feeling, for the Quantum. So they desperately clinging to Classical mechanics, something best suited for artillery shells…

As the Quantum is essentially nonlocal, and fundamental to consciousness, so is consciousness.

And what of the Quantum deniers? Well they miss entirely the immensely rich new logic that Quantum logic has offered beyond Classical logic…

The preceding should not be construed as an endorsement of so-called weirdly named “extrasensory perception”. Instead, I have argued that the sensory system itself is nonlocal (pretty much a physiological evidence, too, as we see with 17 areas…)

A trivial, but telling, case could be called “Free Will and Cosmic Rays”. Cosmic rays, cosmic elementary particles, can be millions of times more energetic than the most powerful elementary particles created by man, at CERN (their origin is obscure, logically speaking). It is known that cosmic rays can change the states of present computers (so even present computers are unpredictable!) Now the scale at which present computers operate is classical (as in classical mechanics), it is hundreds of times larger than the scale at which the inner machinery of cells operate.

That means that the inner machinery of neurons will be put in different states by cosmic rays, just like smartphones. There goes the freedom of Free Will. “Free Will” may feel free, but it may well have, and sometimes surely will have been, directed from a galaxy long ago, far away… This spectacular conclusion is not a matter of opinion. It’s a matter of science. And I have not even considered the question of (the extremely nonlocal) Quantum Entanglement. Quantum Entanglement is real and makes matters way worse.

Some will say, that’s fine, we don’t need to know all this stuff, we can be happy, and we can still pontificate about our classical notions of “Free Will” and “Consciousness”. Indeed, those who want to stay primitive, should. Yes. Yet, within bounds. There are limits to barbarity that civilization needs to set-up, as a matter of survival.

Those who want to cling to a more barbarian, less scientific past certainly cannot claim to have the will to moral superiority. They are like those who believe Muhammad rode to Jerusalem on a winged mule. One cannot accept the principle that one can believe in anything, accept that anybody can believe in anything, and civilization will go on. Verily, superior morality, superior smarts.

If anything, Quantum Physics show that much more things are connected in mysterious ways than ever thought possible. Even space and time get entangled in “Quantum Procrastination“, and cease to have any conventional meaning.

To believe that this completely new, immensely more subtle than was ever suspected (Quantum) universe, has nothing to do with the way we perceive it, and conceive of it, would be an astoundingly naive, revoltingly obsolete, lack of introspection, a short step away from those winged mules.

Patrice Ayme’

Free Will Destroys The Holographic Principle

Abstract: Many famous physicists promote (themselves and) the “Holographic Universe” (aka the “Holographic Principle”). I show that the Holographic Universe is incompatible with the notion of Free Will.

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When studying Advanced Calculus, one discovers situations where the information on the boundary of a locale enables to reconstitute the information inside. From my mathematical philosophy point of view, this phenomenon is a generalization of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. That says that the sum of infinitesimals df is equal to the value of the function f on its boundary.

The Fundamental Theorem of Calculus was discovered by the French lawyer and MP, Fermat, usually rather known for proposing a theorem in Number Theory, which took nearly 400 years to be proven! Fermat actually invented calculus, a bigger fish he landed while Leibniz and Newton’s parents were in diapers.

As Wikipedia puts it, inserting a bit of francophobic fake news for good measure:  “Fermat was the first person known to have evaluated the integral of general power functions. With his method, he was able to reduce this evaluation to the sum of geometric series.[10] The resulting formula was helpful to Newton, and then Leibniz, when they independently developed the fundamental theorem of calculus.” (Independently of each other, but not of Fermat; Fermat published his discovery in 1629. Newton and Leibniz were born in 1642 and 1646…)  

Holography is a fascinating technology.  

Basic Setup To Make A Hologram. Once the Object, The Green Star, Has Fallen Inside A Black Hole, It’s Clearly Impossible To Make A Hologram of the Situation, If Free Will Reigns Inside the Green Star.

The objection is similar to that made in Relativity with light: if one goes at the speed of light (supposing one could), and look at a mirror, the light to be reflected could never catch-up with the mirror. Hence, once reaching the speed of light, one could not look oneself into a mirror. Einstein claimed he got this idea when he was 16-year-old (cute, but by then others had long figured out the part off Relativity pertaining to that situation…

My further objection below is going to be a bit more subtle.

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Here Is The Holographic Principle As Described In Wikipedia:

The holographic principle is a principle of string theories and a supposed property of quantum gravity that states that the description of a volume of space can be thought of as encoded on a lower-dimensional boundary to the region—preferably a light-like boundary like a gravitational horizon. First proposed by Gerard ‘t Hooft, it was given a precise string-theory interpretation by Leonard Susskind[1] who combined his ideas with previous ones of ‘t Hooft and Charles Thorn.[1][2] As pointed out by Raphael Bousso,[3] Thorn observed in 1978 that string theory admits a lower-dimensional description in which gravity emerges from it in what would now be called a holographic way.

In a larger sense, the theory suggests that the entire universe can be seen as two-dimensional information on the cosmological horizon, the event horizon from which information may still be gathered and not lost due to the natural limitations of spacetime supporting a black hole, an observer and a given setting of these specific elements,[clarification needed] such that the three dimensions we observe are an effective description only at macroscopic scales and at low energies. Cosmological holography has not been made mathematically precise, partly because the particle horizon has a non-zero area and grows with time.[4][5]

The holographic principle was inspired by black hole thermodynamics, which conjectures that the maximal entropy in any region scales with the radius squared, and not cubed as might be expected. In the case of a black hole, the insight was that the informational content of all the objects that have fallen into the hole might be entirely contained in surface fluctuations of the event horizon.

***

The Superficiality Principle Rules:

I long suspected that physicists and mathematicians are taken by the beauty of the simplification of knowing the inside from the outside. It’s a sort of beauty, fashion model way of looking at the world. It miserably fails with Black Holes.

To figure this out, one needs to know one thing about Black Holes, and another in philosophy of mind.

***

FREE WILL DEMOLITION OF THE HOLOGRAPHIC PRINCIPLE:

My reasoning is simple:

1. Consider a Black Hole so large that a human being can fall into it without been shredded by tidal effects. A few lines of high school computation show that a Milky Way sized volume with the density of air on Earth is a Black Hole: light falling into it, cannot come back. (Newton could have made the computation and Laplace did it.)
2. So here we have this Human (call her H), falling in the Milky Way Air Black Hole (MWAB).
3. Once past the boundary of the Black Hole, Human H cannot be communicated with from the outside of the boundary (at least from known physics).
4. What the Holographic proponent claim is that they can know what is inside the MWAB.
5. Suppose that Human H decides to have scrambled eggs for breakfast instead of pancakes. The partisans of the Holographic Universe claim that they had the information already. However they stand outside of the MWAB, the giant Black Hole, and cannot communicate with its interior. Nevertheless, Susskind and company claim they knew it all along.

That is obviously grotesque. (Except if you believe Stanford physicists are omniscient, omnipotent gods, violating known laws of physics: that is basically what they claim.)

This is not as ridiculous as the multiverse (the most ridiculous theory ever). But it’s pretty ridiculous too. (Not to say that the questions Free Will lead to in physics are all ridiculous: they are not, especially regarding Quantum Theory!)

By the way, there are other objections against the Holographic Universe having to do with the COSMOLOGICAL Event Horizon (in contradistinction of those generated by Black Holes). Another time…

***

We Are Hypocrites, So We Live From Fake News:

Tellingly, the men promoting the Holographic Universe are Nobel Laureates, or the like. Such men tend to be very ambitious, full of Free Will, ready to say, or do anything, to dominate (I have met dozens in person). It is revealing that so great their Free Will is, that they are ready to contradict what they are all about, to make everybody talk about themselves, and promote their already colossal glories.

Patrice Ayme’

Three Neurons, Free Will

Modern Slaves Are Predictable, Free Worms Are Not:

Enough of these sad songs about how plutocracy, stupidity, cowardice and greed rule! Her is a radical change of perspective: worms are smart, and willful! Yes, even worms have Free Will. Too bad for those who thought god controlled everything. Too bad for those who thought animals were machines. Too bad for those controlled by a decerebrating media: they are predictable, whereas worms are not.

That worms have free will is what a study led by Cori Bargmann shows. She is, among other titles, Torsten N. Wiesel Professor, head of the Lulu and Anthony Wang Laboratory of Neural Circuits and Behavior at Rockefeller University (Americans love complicated titles, because they aspire to aristocracy, and what all too many are deprived of, nobility; Torsten Wiesel, a Swedish neurologist, got the Nobel, and was president of Rockefeller).

Brainy Blonde Cori Bargmann “Think Like A Worm”

Researchers can genetically engineer just two, or three neurons in the worm’s head to glow bright green if those neurons respond to stimulus.

Each neuron in the worm’s brain is assigned a three letter name. By zapping specific neurons with a laser beam, the neuron’s role is deduced from whatever function the worm lost, subsequent to neurological destruction.

So doing, working through the 302 neurons of Caenorhabditis elegans, Cornelia Bargmann discovered that just one neuron control worm hibernation and that worms have a sense of smell, and taste.

In 2011, Bargmann was asked what would be required to understand the worm’s nervous system fully. “You would want to understand a behavior all the way through, and then how the behavior can change. That goal is not unattainable.”

Well, in the end, I believe the behavior of neurons will be found to boil down to Quantum, or even SUB-Quantum physics (an allusion to nonlocal effects). So, in the end, there will be no full understanding of behavior, just good guesses of what behavior could be. (Something all humans know about other humans already.)

This is indeed what Bargmann discovered in 2015 points towards.

[See below much of the press release from Rockefeller. Also a 2011 NYT’s article on Bargmann’s lab, “In Tiny Worm, Unlocking Secrets of the Brain” may help.]

***

FREE WILL WORM GNAWING OLD PHILOSOPHY:

First, let me philosophize on this recent scientific discovery, which is bound to shatter many old illusions. Philosophy means guess further, or observe, what it all means, or could mean.

Saint Bernard made a rather enlightened observation: “the animal spirit or soul is limited by time – it dies with the body.” Descartes, five centuries later, advanced the grotesque thesis that animals were machines. It was grotesque, because anybody familiar with animals can tell they have free will.

Now neurologists have put Free Will down to as little as three neurons.

Indeed, then, worms are not machines, at least not in the classical sense. Given an input, they behave in unpredictable way, differently from classical machines. That is what the neurologists found.

Do we know of machines behaving that way? Yes. Quantum machines. A Quantum machine is driven by the unpredictable certainty of Quantum Waves.

Are worms then Quantum machines? Yes and no, as Abelard would say. Not necessarily, but probably.

Worms were exposed to a stimulus, a delicious smell. The same smell, always, but it did not give rise to the same reaction. Sometimes worms wormed their way towards the source of the smell, sometimes not.

Conclusion?

The worms’ thinking prevent us to predict its behavior. (Worms are smarter than politicians, the latter being thoroughly predictable!)

Plato famously considered his cave, where people were described as watching shadows on a wall. That was supposed to depict the relationship between humans and reality. The image is still popular among philosophers, and so consequences of it trickle down to the masses.

Plato’s picture is interesting, and it sure applies to propaganda from the powerful, and the way it is received by most. But only as such. As a depiction of how the minds of free worms, let alone, free humans, works, it fails utterly.

However, as far as what science says, and thus, what philosophy ought to confirm, buttress, and fly from, Plato’s picture is now completely obsolete, deprived of reality and imagination.

If a network composed of only three neurons can have an internal mind of its own, a cave of its own, we have to review and change, the concept of mind.

So, what is a mind? A mind, even reduced to three neurons, a network of a mind, has its own mind. How could that be?

Minds are worlds, this is why and how they will. Let me explain.

Quantum Physics describes the behavior of Quantum Waves. Quantum Waves sort-of think (one thousand and one naïve philosophers screaming at this point).

What is thinking? Roughly, “looking”, or perceiving (somehow) what is out there, and then conducting a computation (of sorts) taking what is out there in consideration.

This is exactly what Quantum Waves do.

The roundworm, our hero of will, has 2,000 genes controlling its sense of smell (twice what the rats have, and rats have excellent olfaction). Roundworms do not hear, and do not see, they are all about smell.

That world of smell occupy (part of) their 302 neurons, and build up the rest.

Could we made a “classical” model of a three neuron network? Perhaps, in first order. Actually, even classical model, complete with guiding waves, have been partly made, not just on a computer, but experimentally… for Quantum Waves.

However, in the end, Quantum processes will be found to be non-local (because, well, they are). That will ultimately limit classical, guiding waves models of Quantum waves, Black Holes, or even Roundworms three neuron networks.

If a piece of a worm’s mind is a world, entangled with the rest of the galaxy at a distance, philosophy also has to stretch.

Some would say that whether minds are Quantum, or entangled at a distance, will not bring the bacon on the table: this is neither here, nor there, as it has no practical effects. They would be wrong. Indeed, Non-Local philosophical models, Non-local, Quantum models of thinking, will allow to stretch human understanding so far that it may end up meeting reality itself.

Patrice Ayme’

***

Here is much of the press release from Rockefeller University:

“Analysis of worm neurons suggests how a single stimulus can trigger different responses

March 12, 2015 | Science News

Even worms have free will. If offered a delicious smell, for example, a roundworm will usually stop its wandering to investigate the source, but sometimes it won’t. Just as with humans, the same stimulus does not always provoke the same response, even from the same individual. New research at Rockefeller University, published March 12 2015, in Cell, offers a new neurological explanation for this variability, derived by studying a simple three-cell network within the roundworm brain.

Worm brain: All the neurons within this microscopic roundworm are highlighted, with the large cluster at one end representing the brain. Coelomocytes, a type of immune cell, appear as dots along the body.

“We found that the collective state of the three neurons at the exact moment an odor arrives determines the likelihood that the worm will move toward the smell. So, in essence, what the worm is thinking about at the time determines how it responds,” says study author Cori Bargmann, Torsten N. Wiesel Professor, head of the Lulu and Anthony Wang Laboratory of Neural Circuits and Behavior. “It goes to show that nervous systems aren’t passively waiting for signals from outside, they have their own internal patterns of activity that are as important as any external signal when it comes to generating a behavior.”

… By changing the activity of the neurons individually and in combination [researchers] could pinpoint each neuron’s role in generating variability in both brain activity and the behavior associated with it.

The human brain has 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses, or connections, among them. The brain of the microscopic roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, by comparison, has 302 neurons and 7,000 synapses. So while the worm’s brain cannot replicate the complexity of the human brain, scientists can use it to address tricky neurological questions that would be nearly impossible to broach in our own brains.

Worms spend their time wandering, looking for decomposing matter to eat. And when they smell it, they usually stop making random turns and travel straight toward the source. This change in behavior is initially triggered by a sensory neuron that perceives the smell and feeds that information to the network the researchers studied. As the worms pick up the alluring fruity smell of isoamyl alcohol, the neurons in the network transition into a low activity state that allows them to approach the odor. But sometimes the neurons remain highly active, and the worm continues to wander around – even though its sensory neuron has detected the odor.

By recording the activity of these neurons, Gordus and colleagues found that there were three persistent states among the three neurons: All were off, all were on, or only one, called AIB, was on. If all were off, then, when the odor signal arrived, they stayed off. If all were on, they often, but not always, shut off. And, in the third and most telling scenario, if AIB alone was active when the odor arrived, everything shut off. “This means that for AIB, context matters. If it’s on alone, its activity will drop when odor is added, but if it’s on with the rest of the network, it has difficulty dropping its activity with the others,” Gordus says.

AIB is the first neuron in the network to receive the signal, which it then relays to the other two network members, known as RIM and AVA; AVA sends out the final instruction to the muscles. When the researchers shut off RIM and AVA individually and together, they found AIB’s response to the odor signal improved. This suggests that input from these two neurons competes with the sensory signal as it feeds down through the network.

Scaled up to account for the more nuanced behaviors of humans, the research may suggest ways in which our brains process competing motivations. “For humans, a hungry state might lead to you walk across the street to a delicious smelling restaurant. However, a competing aversion to the cold might lead you to stay indoors,” he says.

In the worm experiments, the competition between neurons was influenced by the state of the network. There is plenty of evidence suggesting network states have a similar impact on animals with much larger and more complex brains, including us, says Bargmann…“In a mammalian nervous system, millions of neurons are active all the time. Traditionally, we think of them as acting individually, but that is changing. Our understanding has evolved toward seeing important functions in terms of collective activity states within the brain.”

FREE WILL Was Not Built Yesterday

Free Will Is No Free Lunch.

Wherein It is Shown That “Free Will” Is, At Best, a Quantum Architectural Process, Thus Something Long In The Making: If You Want Freedom, You Need To Work On Your Brain. 

In Mental Inertia, I argued that much of what humans do has to do with being dragged along with what one has become, and, or, the thing, or behavior that has already started. Many made the observation long before, but what is new is that the enormous architecture of the brain makes it amply clear why it is so. And that there are no derogation.

It remains to consider what this means for the problem of “Free Will”. And for the SOLUTION of “Free Will”.

Mental inertia is both problem and solution for “Free Will”.

The Franks Exhibited Their Colorful Variegated Wills

“Free Will” causes a traditional problem for a train of thought in the West. This so-called “compatibility problem” comes from believing in an absolute, omnipotent god… Or from believing into what came to replace the omnipotent Judaic god: an absolute, omnipotent, completely deterministic Classical Mechanics.

There was a near-civil war among Catholics in France in the Seventeenth Century about the problem of “Free Will” (then called the problem of “Grace”). Blaise Pascal was on the side of the omnipotence of god (after he had a near fatal disease and became nuts). Louis XIV had to intervene, and shut down the “Jansenists“, the fundamentalists who believed in the ultra omnipotence of god.

If either omnipotent god, or omnipotent determinism, holds the universe in its grip, individuals are pre-determined. They have no freedom. There can no “Free Will”.

This is counterfactual: obviously, the Franks who founded the West, were extremely free. “Frank” means “Free”, or “Ferocious” (a distinction without a difference). And the Franks had lots of Will: a few tens of thousands of Frankish warriors came to rule over many million Gallo-Romans and Germans. The defeated all other armies in Galli and the Germanias.

How could the Franks be compatible with the old omnipotent God? Naturally, they were not: Clovis, King, Consul, and Imperator, knew this well. So Clovis re-invented God, in his own special way. All right, Constantine had done the same, two centuries earlier. Constantine, after fighting them, had allied himself to the Franks. Clovis threw away the old metaphysics of the Evangels.

As Clovis said, “if me and my Franks had been there, Jesus would never have been crucified!”

It is not that Clovis did not understand the ancient passive message of submission to the child-sacrificing Abrahamic god. No. Clovis did NOT want to understand it. Where Abrahamism taught submission to the child-killing, omnipotent, freakish god, the great rabid dog in the sky, Clovis taught reason, and thus rebellion, and the dignity of common sense.

The Franks, the Free, the Ferocious, wiped clean the errors of the Greco-Roman civilization, and especially its Catholic degeneracy, and dysfunctional slavery. Frankish Will founded the civilization we have. And it was all because the Franks were so Free and Ferocious. It would have happen without.

The Franks made a caricature of old Catholicism, and threw it to the oubliettes de l’histoire.

the Franks had so much Will, that they could afford tolerance, and highly colored clothing. Tolerance was how the Franks ruled: all those unfortunates that rabid Catholicism had excluded, such as “Philosophers”, Pagans, Jews, and other traditional ideologies, were welcome back as full members of society. More than that: the Catholic TERROR was removed as a factor clamping down on the minds.

By 600 CE, everybody in the huge Imperium Francorum, was a Frank. (In another two centuries, they called themselves “Roman” again.)

Frankish Will was force. In the recent terrorist attacks in Paris, it turns out that the three attackers were viewed as terrorists (“fiché”) by the State. But the French, nowadays, have lost the Will which characterized the Franks (in the 1960s, such terrorists would have been preventively detained. This is how De Gaulle broke the OAS. Around 1,000 French are fichés.)

FREE WILL IS BACK!

Nobody serious and well educated believes in God or Classical Mechanics anymore: the former was exposed as a trick of elites, the latter has been replaced by Quantum Physics.

Thus nothing stands again to block Free Will, on a matter of principle. If I were Nietzsche, I would add something he did not think of: the old omnipotent god destroyed by its very omnipotence the very possibility of Freedom. That was the whole idea of the Roman emperors of the Late Empire, starting with Diocletian (circa 300 CE).

On the face of it, the expression “Free Will” is revealing. “Free Will”? Is there Will that is not free? Is it well known, in the West, that Will can come in a non-free variant?

Can Will be chained, or, let’s say played with, amplified? This is the very idea which makes baboon armies so dangerous, and, thus efficient: when 200 male baboons act as one, that’s 400 four centimeters long canine facing the enemy. The King of Prussia Frederik the Great’s superior military rested a lot on discipline second to none. The more an army’s soldiers have the Will of the Chief, the more efficient it is.

Is Will getting leveraged, like anything else in this singularity-of-technology age? Well, yes, of course. Just look at Jihadists; their Will is getting leveraged… Through an amplification from institutionalized hatred, much of it from electrons circulating in the Internet.

Now they show on the Internet how they burn their enemies alive.

More scientifically, yet less profoundly, Konrad Lorentz and others showed that animals with brains can be “imprinted”. Their neurobiology, exposed at particular times, such as the first time, to some input, can stay that way forever.

For example, Lorentz made baby geese behave as if he were their mother. The experience has been reproduced a lot since. Come to think of it, it is central to enable animal husbandry, so it should not be exactly news

FREE WILL: A QUANTUM ARCHITECTURE

Free Will will, of course involve all of Quantum Physics. Roger Penrose, jumping on that bandwagon, believed the Quantum would show up as originating from pretty large scale objects (“micro-tubules”). That was very far-fetched.

All what is sure, and that’s enough, is that all molecular processes (including DNA) will see the evolution of their finer features Quantum controlled.

Quantum Biology will dominate biology, within a few decades. Meanwhile, physicists had to take into account the fact that we may have no Free Will whatsoever, and thus have been condemned, in a Quantum Sisyphusian way, to repeat the Quantum Non-Locality experiments after excluding carefully all and any human being.

Per the delocalized nature of Quantum Processes, we will get there a framework for consciousness corresponding the intuition we have of it.

Then the real question becomes: how Free is a Will that emanates from Quantum Processes? Quantum Processes are delocalized, and entangled, throughout. They make an architecture. Free Will, thus, is not a point-wise effect, in the instant. It is going to be an architecture.

Free Will was not built yesterday. And it was built from a world of inputs and entanglements. We are observers, experimenters, tinkerers and explorers of our own minds. We may be free in some ways, but not of the heavens, hells, and routines we have built onto ourselves, and been imprinted with.

We can will Will, but we are not free to will a Will we did not freely willed, for a very long time, and through much hard brain work. That is why people who live under Submission, will always be slaves, even if, in their impotent hysteria, they go around and about burning people alive, here and there.

Patrice Ayme’

 

Free Will & Quantum

It is natural to suspect that those who evoke the Quantum at every turn are a bit deranged. Has a Quantum obsession replaced God? God died, but not the need to obsess? (Dominique Deux made a wry remark in that direction.)

Nietzsche himself is an example. Having “killed” (his father’s) “God“, Nietzsche obsessed about the (Indian based) “Eternal Return of the Same”, something from the Zeitgeist. Henri Poincare’ soon demonstrated some dynamical systems roughly do this (although I certainly do not believe all Solar Systems will; recent observations have confirmed my hunch: many Solar Systems are very unstable, the Sun-Jupiter harmony may be rare…)

Quasar & Host Galaxy [NASA-ESA Hubble]

[The picture, from 1996, is poor, as the Quasar is very far. We need another telescope, but plutocrats don’t want it, because they would have to pay more taxes, thus rendered unable to treat the Commons as dirt as much as they desire. Yet, in spite of the plutocratically imposed low resolution, one can see the mighty ultra-relativistic jets arising from the Quasar’s core.]

Obsessing about the Quantum is obsessing about the true nature of Nature. As it turns out it’s much simpler and magical than the classical picture.

Nature is the Quantum writ large. Relativity, the Standard model, the Big Bang: these are all amusements of dubious veracity. The Quantum is the Real Thing. And it’s everywhere. Most people just don’t know it yet.

Even Biological Evolution Theory, or Free Will, are going to be revealed to be within the Quantum’s empire.

There is something called “Free Will Skepticism” as massaged in Gregg Caruso Scientia Salon’s essays, and his (celebrity) TED talk. It is not so much skepticism about the existence of Free Will, but skepticism that those who loudly believe in “Free Will” have a constructive, progressive attitude in the society of the USA.

Ultimately, the problem of Free Will will have to tackle the problem of what are exactly the free agents in Quantum Physics.

Well, nobody knows for sure. What the free agents are is the central problem of Quantum Computing, and the high energy physicists’ wild goose chase for high energy processes went the other way, for two generations, so we don’t know what determines the evolution of the Quantum systems.

High energy processes are of interest only in high energy places, none of which are found where the biosphere lays. In other words, much physics, high energy physics used the Quantum, but did not try to figure it out.

Not knowing what the free agents, if any, of Quantum Physics are imply that we do not know what determines the evolution of the simplest processes.

The simplest processes are, by definition, the Quantum processes.

As long as we do not really know what controls simplest systems, talking about whether there is Free Will, or not, is shooting the breeze.

Free Will is even a problem in Quantum Non-Local analysis.

On-going experiments on non-locality. In some hard core physics labs. Those experiments aim to turn around the problem that we may have no Free Will.

The situation is this: doing a measurement at point A was found to have an influence at point B. The influence propagates orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light (as the formalism of basic Quantum Physics theory predicts).

French physicist Alain Aspect was able to show this with crafty optico-acoustic devices (he got the Wolf prize for this, and, clearly, ought to get the physics Nobel). The question remained, though, that maybe Alain Aspect himself was a pre-determined phenomenon deprived of Free Will.

To check this, Aspect’s experiment is going to be re-run with distant quasars in charge (rather than just some French guys). MIT physics department is doing this.

Free Will is the last major loophole of Bell’s inequality — a 50-year-old theorem on Spin that, as it is violated by experiments, means that the universe is based not the (topologically separated) laws of classical physics, but on Non-Locality.

Actually this is all very simple. (No need for the fancy high school math of Bell’s theorem, a particular case of Non-Locality with spins.)

Two quasars on opposite sides of heavens are so distant from each other, that they would have been out of causal contact since the (semi-mythical) Big Bang some 14 billion years ago: there are no possible means for any third party to communicate with both of them since the (semi-mythical) beginning of the universe…

Now, of course, if my own version of the universe is true, and the universe is actually 100 billion years old, the “loophole” re-opens…

But of course, as a philosopher, I know perfectly well that I have Free Will, and, as a momentarily benevolent soul, I extend the courtesy to Alain Aspect.

The universe is Non-Local, even my Free Will is Non-Local, it does not have to be like long dead gentlemen thought it should be.

Patrice Ayme’

MOODS RULE THOUGHTS

Systems Of Moods Overwhelm Systems of Thought.

MOODS MAKE UP THE GENETICS OF LOGIC:

Are we born with “instincts” such as “care”, and the like? Or do we learn? I believe we learn (much of this being fast learning, and, mostly, subconscious). How does that work? Well, it would work from General Topology informing neurogenesis.

French philosopher Foucault baptized himself historian of systems of thought, when he got a professorship at the prestigious Collège de France in 1970. (Collège de France, the ultimate think institution, is five centuries old.)

I have gone one further, by introducing Systems of Moods. Why moods? Emotion Primes Reason. However, rarely does one emotion rule alone, but for ravenous hunger, abject terror, and other animalistic crazes. Instead, when we meditate ponderously, we are usually ruled by moods.

What’s a mood? It’s a cocktail of emotions. Systems of Moods are articulated with their own logic. Pascal discovered this, when he said “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison n’a pas”.

Why and how does the “heart” have its own logic? The answer has to do with where does logic come from? Logic is basically about arrows, implications: ’if A, then B’.

Where do these “thens”, these implications, come from? When one says:’I have a bad feeling about this’, one reasons out of a mood: the forest is suddenly too quiet, or a bird made an alarm sound… And suddenly all of one’s senses are in full alert.

Sets of moods will tend to topological relations. Instead of the one to one relations of logic or category theory. Topology, the logic of places, can bring to bear relationships that are much more general than ‘if A then B’. Relations such as: ’if A is close to B while C is close to D, when closer to A than B, then…’

This topo-logic can be embodied by neurohormones, neurotransmitters, and the neighborhoods they create (neighborhood is here used in the exact mathematical, General Topological sense). This no idle theory: it’s known that dendrites, and other neuronal structures, tend to grow in some directions, depending upon these chemicals. That means that the neurological relations of linear logic are built from the emotional and neurohormonal calculus.

***

AN EXAMPLE WHERE MOODS DOMINATE, AND LOGIC IS SECONDARY:

I am going to use an example that arose from my adventures at a philosophy website. It’s rather complex, so let me give an abstract first: a philosophy professor drew a correct conclusion, yet the EXACT OPPOSITE conclusion is also valid. How is that possible? It is because, once some moods and emotions are rolled out, logic can go one way, or the other.

So much for the old hope that determinism and logic (in the conventional sense) rule all.

The example was extracted from Scientia Salon, a site run by university philosophers.

Philosophy professor Gregg Caruso considered polls on the behavior of USA citizens (that’s called “experimental philosophy”). Verdict? The relationship between believing in Free Will and believing that low lives dug their own fates, seems strong in the USA.

Gregg wrote: “juries — eager to preserve their belief in a just world — are already inclined to see the victim … as other than innocent… just one unfortunate example of the pernicious nature of belief in a just world… since, of course, if the world is just, then people must have brought these circumstances upon themselves. This blaming of victims (in defense of belief in a just world) has been established by numerous studies… the stronger the belief in a just world the greater the likelihood of blaming victims for their unfortunate fates.”

Any society rests on logic. The logic does not have to be all-embracing, it just has to be effective enough to support the social organization. Gregg’s general thesis is a good antidote to the present logic dominating the USA. Yet a USA social truth does not have to be a truth of human ethology.

And it is not, as egregious cases in non-USA based history and geography show.

The Nazis believed the less Free Will, the better: “society’s needs come before the individual’s needs” (Adolf Hitler). So did the followers of Stalin. So do, to a great extent some of the Muslim religions (so called “branches” of Islam). All believe(d) that individual Free Will had to be eradicated. Islam comes from aslama “he submitted”.

All believe(d) that the world could be made just through the application of strength, and the Will of God, the General Secretary, or the Guide.

Now, if I abstract the examples above (Stalinism, Nazism, Islamism), I can rephrase the grand conclusion of Gregg, into its complete contradiction. Below I just changed “Free Will” into “NON Free Will”:

…belief in NON free will, it was found, by studying the historical examples above, is associated with just world belief, authoritarianism, religiosity, punitiveness, and moralistic standards for judging self and other. While these considerations do not prove belief in NON free will is mistaken, they do indicate that the putative pragmatic benefits of believing in NON free will and desert-based moral responsibility are bogus.

Gregg showed that in the USA to doubt Free Will would allow society to progress. History, in many other places show that rejecting Free Will led to horrible societies.

How come Gregg’s informed logic and concrete polls can be turned on its head? What is going on?

The answer is from the theory of systems of moods. The reason that the logic can be turned on its head is that what truly matters are the mood and subjacent emotions.

Example. The Nazis posed themselves as victims of an unjust world (big, bad, rich, hypocritical, Indian exterminating America; Versailles Treaty). Germans, all over, were oppressed minorities. Only surrendering Free Will would be bring back justice and stop the punition they were submitted to.

Strong emotions, bound by strong logic, make strong medicine. Yet, the logic is secondary. It could go whichever way. This is what the apparent truth of both Free Will Skepticism, and the truth of its exact opposite, my pernicious anti-thesis (just an observation, too), demonstrate.

Foucault suggested that power laid in discourses, more than anything else. I agree. Yet, beyond that, power lays in the raw emotions, and the moods they blossom into. The exact nature of the way they get organized is an afterthought.

Here is an explicit example: Christianism and love. Christ said that to love was the commanding commandment. Fine. However, read what he exactly said:

“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

What’s the strongest emotion here? Jesus says it himself: loving obedience to “the Lord”. He puts it first. However, obedience is not the most prominent feature of human ethology (raw love probably is, next to the survival instinct). Thus the implied logic is the violence one has to exert to do something unnatural, obeying a so-called “Lord”.

In the end, Jesus’ primary emotion holds in just one word: “Lord”. Jesus is a plutophile: loving a “Lord” is the first law.

He, and others, can put whatever logic they want after that to embellish the ugliness, and comfort the horror. It does not really matter. The overall mood flows from there, one concept: “the Lord”. The rest is just rearranging the chairs on the sinking Titanic of Jesus’ make belief goodness.

Patrice Ayme’

Free Will, Meta Will, Evil, & the Good Lord

That “Free Will” is not free of society was made clear in Europe with the example of fascism (German, Soviet, Italian, Spanish, in historical order, not to mention Slavs and Balkans…). Various nationalistic crazes and pogrom like activities have shown the natural tendencies of entire peoples to behave like nasty robotic mass-homicidal torturing monsters.

Europe was founded and named, by the Franks. The Frankish government, in antique Roman Republican style, “renovated” by its good offices, was tolerant of all superstitions, including Catholicism, Paganism, Atheism, Judaism, and even Islamism.

However, coincident to and related with, the rise of extravagant Middle-Ages plutocracy, society became much less tolerant. The trigger was the First Crusade. In 1099 CE, Jews were mass massacred, in Alsace and further east, when herds of violent Catholics, full of enraged fervor. migrated east to take back Jerusalem.

Evil, Intel Of Angel

The grand conclusion of this experience in hatred was revealed to the world by American Army generals in 1945, when the horror of extermination camps was revealed (the logical chain of Jew hatred went from burning all Cathars to Saint Louis, to Luther). In those Nazi camps around 22 million people were assassinated, according to the latest estimates (11 million killed for racist reasons, including 6 million Jews, plus 3.3 million Russian army prisoners, etc…).

Thus, after World War Two, social engineering in many European countries repaired the society to cure the individuals. It seems to have worked: the probability of being victim of a very serious crime, or being incarcerated, is an order of magnitude (a factor of ten) lower in Western Europe, than in the USA.

Does Knowledge Cause Crime?

That knowledge causes crime is the argument the partisans of obsolete moral systems always use. In a trivial, self-referencing way, they are right: if one defines crime as what the old moral system forbids, the change of moral systems will always cause crime. Having women starting to drive in Saudi Arabia would not doubt augment the crime rate.

However, human beings are knowledge and wisdom machines. Once they know what influences them, they take it into account.

Why? Human beings have long known that what’s in their heads is not necessarily what is out there. All hunters know that what appear is not necessarily what there is. They did not have to wait one million years for Nietzsche to tell them that. Superiorly differentiating distortions in information and the nature of reality, is what make a better predators, hence a more successful human being, or group.

Better philosophy eats better, and survives better. It’s the ultimate weapon. (Example: Athens at its apogee, when a herd of philosophers drove the state, and was able to harness the Free Will of its citizenry in a superlative armed polis.)

Saying that “Free Will does not exist” is not really what is going on. Much of what looks like “free” is actually a product of the group. Free Will arises from “Meta Will” what J-J. Rousseau called the “General Will”. The “General Will” will be hard to define: after all, it’s a mathematical notion going beyond our present computational capabilities (a typical case where Quantum Computing will help).

Any social thinking, where part of the Meta Will lays, is tainted in the USA by the background of the American police and justice systems, with its incarceration rate more than five times the world average (and much more if one takes into account all those under judicial surveillance, a category developed more in the USA than anywhere else).

Much “Free Will” being “Group Will”, if one does not like what the former leads to, one has to work on the latter. This is why what society believes in, say in a superstition, does not just impact individuals, it makes them up into what they are. (Consider the Middle-East an its imbroglio of fanatical, lethally opposed superstitions.)

The more we know, the more we can act upon the world, and thus the more freedom we have. However freedom is not what plutocrats want to see average people enjoy. Plutocrats go according to their namesake, Pluto, Satan. Demons in hell do not want to see those they are supposed to torture, enjoying freedom, or enjoying anything at all.

Yet, it’s the other way. Overall, on a civilizational scale, knowledge augments not just power, but morality.

The more we know, the more we know when we are not acting for the best, the more we can accuse ourselves of not acting well. And thus, the greater the opportunity we have to act well, and the better we will act.

We have a moral system which is evolutionary given (evolution being the Creator we had been looking for!). This natural Human Ethology interacts both with the Meta Will and individual Free Will.

However, in the USA the Plutocratic mentality is triumphant (latest GDP growth at an annual rate of 5%, not far behind plutocratic China). In this social paradigm, the Randian worship of the rugged individual is celebrated. People have to work, not by choice, as in Europe, but just to survive.

To justify itself, the Plutocratic mentality reveres Free Will. According to this system of thought and mood, all and any success is attributed to immanent justice, a just universe, which rewards character, ability and effort. Sociological studies have proven this.

The tension between Free Will and General Will, is that between Evil and Our Good Lord. It’s a debate, one side can’t think, let alone talk, without the other.

Obama has understood this, just enough to make do. We all have to travel the same road. Our General Will, right now, is called CO2. It will be a heavy cross. Look at the bright side, as Jesus, or Camus, would say.

To be able to smile, and it means something, we have to know how to snarl.

Patrice Ayme’