Meetings/Brushes with the Beast

Writing is not just capturing a thought. It's also capturing the thought well—what I call "capturing the beast." A writer may develop the habit of writing certain thoughts over and over: searching for a good, true expression.

I'm not convinced it's possible to be a decent writer without this habit. While admittedly I have little in the way of scientific proof, from what I've heard and read, creative types often produce tremendous amounts more than they share as final. The repetition is preparation.

It's frustrating for a creative person to get stuck in the same loop. You want to move on to something new, better. But you know you haven't captured the beast yet.

Fair Is a Form of Smart/Sentient

Fairness is something that takes intelligence to recognize, understand, and arrange. One reason the world isn't fairer is simply stupidity.

"Might makes right" is an easy rule for animals to understand. If a lifeform is simple enough, it'll never appreciate the difference between fairness and unfairness anyway—or may experience nothing at all.

It's because we have conscious experience, and because we can become aware of fairness, that it can matter to us so much.

I say this because while I believe fairness is very important, I think if you are getting depressed about the incredible unfairness of the animal kingdom, you can at least consider that many of the animals do not process as deeply as we do and may not be keenly aware, much if any of the time, of what they are missing.

No one is totally free. Totally free means random, and we aren't. Even when you are ostensibly free—free from an outside perspective—you'll need to find your own restrictions so that you can make decisions. Whether this seems intuitive or not, we have to accept that if no possibility is ever cut off or modulated down until the moment of choosing, the choice is random. And even in perfectly unconstrained randomness, that moment of choosing itself does become a constraint. It cuts off every possibility except one. Randomness, paradoxically, though as free as possible, brings with it the restriction that the choice cannot really make sense, cannot be strategic... or at least not in the thoughtful way we understand the word "strategy."

There are scenarios in which the most rational choice would be to become as random as possible to avoid predictability. For example, when you play rock, paper, scissors, in the first approximation at least, the best you can do is to become completely random selecting among three options. This offers the opponent no chance to predict. Game theory tells us that total randomness here gives the opponent no chance to find an advantage except by luck. Yet if there is a chance to predict the opponent in turn, then pure randomness is no longer the best option. The best option is to constrain that randomness—that so-called total freedom—to complement what can be predicted about the opponent's choice.

I think we have a sort of freedom of will because first our minds are highly complex and their activity bubbles up from chaotic factors, but also second because it behooves us to be unpredictable to any opponents. That is, we do not just choose chaotically, and we are not just inherently unpredictable as weather, we choose chaotically-randomly among sensible options. The seemingly infinite spectrum of possible thought and action is whittled down by sensation and emotion - by feeling. To say we can choose without feeling (if this picture I'm painting is true enough) would be absurd, as it is by feeling - by consciousness, by the reflective innerly sculpting of informing ourselves - that we make any decision at all.

We have trouble choosing "randomly" unless there is a criterion. At simplest, that criterion would be "choose randomly!" and we would not know what to do, we would have to depend on our current feeling to constrain and suggest. So "choose randomly!" for us can only mean "do what you feel!"

If we can only, at our freest, do what we feel, we are not entirely free and never will be while we feel. By this way of seeing, death may be the ultimate freedom. What happens to our window at that moment we do not know for certain. It is relatively unconstrained by known fact. It may well be that we blink out forever, but it may also be that something even more mysterious happens. In a real "forever," patterns are likely to recur. Even a pattern as complicated as a life might recur. So we cannot be entirely certain that a sufficiently close pattern will never recur and we will never take consciousness again. Can we? 

Death is a big rolling of hidden dice. We do not understand the factors, yet, that make us conscious, so we cannot say for certain whether they might ever recur. We can say essentially for certain - to everyone's satisfaction - that consciousness itself will recur. We see it everywhere, even in animals. But we do not know whether our own window, which we find so special and meaningful, will ever have another chance - whether with similar biological details or any other set of circumstances. Most of us would like to continue feeling something after death - would like another life - provided it is not too bad a life - even if nearly everything about us were to change other than the living and the tolerability. 

Feeling is evolved strategy. (Evolved and finite, it is likely flawed.) Choosing is, perhaps, evolved randomness within that strategy. (This may begin to compensate for the flawing.)

It may still be that we tap into quantum randomness for a source of pure unpredictability and universe-branching potential. (Shouldn't that be a term? Branching potential? It's a hypothesis, at least. We have to give it that much.) Relativistic effects - unbeknownst to the developers - are necessary for the operation of car batteries. Quantum effects - unbeknownst to the developers - are necessary for the operation of fireworks. Biologists have already demonstrated that birds' sense of direction by magnetic detection depends on quantum effects. This is a proof of concept that evolution has been able, like the developers of fireworks and car batteries, to drill down and harness "rare" physics for specific uses. Evolution can channel quantum effects and no doubt relativistic effects - that is its genius, that it can use anything that can be found, and without intention.

And so why are we so certain - just because we do not see how it would work - that consciousness has no quantum or relativistic properties? Maybe it has both.

Consciousness is a pure moment. It is the essence of immediacy. If we believe relativity, then separated events in space cannot be exactly immediate - cannot be entirely and definitely simultaneous. Maybe consciousness is a complicated tangle of immediacy, and you and I do not share consciousness because our minds are already too far separated in space - and therefore time.

I think it's true. I may be an ignoramus, may be operating on hunches, but I think it's true.

It's entirely possible - maybe even overwhelmingly likely, for all I know - that consciousness has nothing to do with the special features of relativity or quantum mechanics. But it also seems possible - however minutely - that consciousness has in common with black holes a merging of both kinds of effect.

Physicists may be ashamed to suggest such notions without ways to test them. I am not a physicist and I try not to be ashamed. The child in me wants to know and doesn't see why not.

The Empty Proof—What Next?

In the end, everyone is motivated by self-interest. Even if you're sacrificing yourself, you're identifying with something as an extension of yourself.

The ability to identify with something outside the traditional bounds of self depends partly on empathy, a facility or skill that is not equally distributed in the population.

To see someone's self-interest in their actions, in other words, is not, or should not be, to invalidate that person's actions or words.

In the end, everything we do reduces to some form of self-interest. Proving it is so for someone should not be demeaning. It is always so.

What we should instead critique is how and with what effect.