Philosophistry

Abstract Visualization of Free Will / Self-Control -- The Pipe Model

I don't believe in "free will" any more than I believe in an "unfree will." Rather there are stronger and weaker wills.

Changing your personality and controlling your actions are the results of a strong will. To be successful in life, you must not only envision a path, but you must also commit your whole body, heart, and mind toward your goals.

Here is a model to help myself and others develop stronger wills.

Consider the interface between you and the rest of the world. Very simply, there is a membrane of skin and tissue separating the inner world from the outer. Input comes in via your senses, such as vision and hearing, which then slushes around inside of your nervous system and eventually comes out as action, such as through using your hands or speaking.

I have structured the internal "slushing" as a process mediated by pipes. First the input comes down one pipe, then a choice is made, then finally the input converts to output and flows out another pipe. Hopefully you are happy with the last pipe. Can you control which pipe this is?
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Like any plumbing system, flow is controlled with gates...

Only one gate is your "will." While this gate may be switched to your desired path, the rest of your body may not be rallied to your cause. This is the reason why "knowing the way" and "following the way" are often two different things. The goal is to use your "will" to unify the rest of yourself toward a particular action. You already do this on some level if you have ever tried to coach yourself, as I have to do on Fridays, "Come on Phil, do your homework. If you finish early, you'll have the rest of the weekend to party. Besides, it's easy and there's some interesting stuff in the material if you search for it."

How to control the other gates

I've been told frequently to not take myself too seriously, and yet I've never been able to internalize that goal. In other words, my gates are not switched to the "don't take things seriously" pipeline. So I've developed an internal dialog (in italics below) to push me toward being less serious.

I'm learning from cognitive therapy about the various types of gates that we have. When it comes to ratifying everything toward a particular pipe that hasn't been habituated yet, Beck suggests working through the following:

1. socratic reasoning - have an argument with yourself to internalize your reasoning behind a particular choice. Phil, don't take things so seriously, relax, don't force things, and use a light touch. Subjectively nothing is serious anyway, plus you could die at any moment and it would be a shame to have stressed the whole time. Being less serious is akin to freedom, creativity, comfort, and generates massive amounts of energy to apply yourself.

2. behavioral experimentation - use examples from your own life to convince yourself that a particular pathway is actually the best for you. Phil, remember the time when so-and-so happened and you took things too seriously and that ruined your life? Remember that other time that you didn't take yourself seriously and ended up discovering painting and DJing?

3. cognitive continuum - (tricky concept, I won't go into it)

4. rational-emotional role-play (only applies to client-therapy situations)

5. use others as a model - visualize others as examples to encourage you to do the same Be like Jay Leno, not Dr. Phil. Be like so-and-so, not so-and-so

6. as-if - pretend as if you were unified toward a goal, what would you then do? If you truly internalized "not taking things seriously" you would surrender every now and then and willingly do something shoddy every once in a while

7. self-reflection - listen to your heart, see what it is saying, and learn how to work with it.

Each one helps undo our habits and personality traits. Each one is also coded for a specific type of gate. For example, #5 (use others as a model), is precisely the way you might have learnt a particular personality trait. As a child, you picked some role model that you have imitated all your life. If you use cognitive therapy, you can replace your old role models with newer, more helpful ones.

To me, cognitive therapy and self-programming help me follow Yoda's imperative on personal change: "you must unlearn what you have learned"

Credit: Nietzsche gave me the idea of unfree v. weak will

Stability and Free Will

Does our sense of free will depend a lot on the static nature of ourselves. I mean, we don't change much when we're older and as a result, we can make decsions based on facts about our accumulated behavior. If we were dynamic, constantly changing point of views from one day to the next, our decisions would be rendered useless because we don't know how we'll view them in the future and what not. Okay this is a lame post.

Penrose Penrose Penrose.

Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind - quantum consciousness: "1. Free will. Many people are convinced that humans have free will, and yet are also convinced that the Newtonian-mechanical goings-on of things as large as neurons makes no room for free will. They thus turn to quantum mechanics in the hope that the non-determinism of the collapse of the wave function will provide a foot in the door for free will. Of course the wave function collapse is, according to current theory, random, and it is not clear that this is any better than determinism when it comes to explaining free will. Nevertheless, the hope seems to be that, at least in some cases, consciousness exerts its influence on the world through effecting some collapses, presumable some in the brain somewhere, in one way rather than another."

Notion of free will

I think the notion of free will is sustained or found in places where the object makes decisions but has is largely clueless about the decision making process that goes on behind the scenes... to him it can only be considered free will.... when you have an absolute understanding of the machinery that goes on inside of you and outside of you, everything is guaranteed and therefore you don't feel you have any free will.. however, when you're dealing with probabilities and only have to work with uncertaintly valued emotions, there leaves a lot that is less guaranteed and therefore, feels free...

Questions RE: free will:

Does having your "choices" pre-determined deny you free will?
Is free will just a matter of having at least one option to choose from?
Does determinism make free will nonexistent?
Why/how should indeterminism make free will existent?
Do animals have free will and what's the difference between them and humans?
Does your definition of free imply that all humans have free will or can some have and some not?
If so, how does one get free will?
Does your free will allow you to surrender your free will?
Does somebody have free will if they have no power?
If the future is precisely known somewhere out there, do you still have free will?
Why do we have free will?
Should we have free will?
Does it matter whether we do or do not have free will?
How should the knowledge about the existence of free will affect our lives?
Could machines ever have free will?
Does free will require consciousness?
If so, why?

Practical Philosophy

From Nietzsche, the best moment of practical philosophy, or rather, practical psychology, was in his discussion of free will. I can't remember where, but he says that there is no free will just as there is no unfree will. There are only weak and strong wills. And a strong will involves a sort of unification of the individual wills within us toward a singular, endorsed objective. This makes tremendous sense and is a good key to achieving happiness, fulfillment, consistency, etc. But, of course, a commons sense guide could have led you there without all the philosophical broo-hah....saying something like, "in everything we do, part of us wants to do it, another part doesn't, so the trick is getting everybody on board." Yay simple thinking.

From Sartre, my favorite moment of practical psychology comes when he discusses action and how actions retroactively determine for us what we think is right. If you want to know what you really want in life, all you have to do is look at what you actually chose to do. For you only let the strongest urges within you win, what reason is there to not endorse everything you do? The practical part is that it gives an argument for not worrying about what you do before you do it for you'll do what is best anyways. My counter-argument is that our "endorsement" will is a separate will outside of what we actually do. i.e. I may end up over-drinking, but I wouldn't be proud of my actions, and as a result, I'd be unhappy about that decision. Sartre would then argue well, your passion for drinking was stronger and by its strength, you chose to drink. Sure, one could say that on a technical level but that's not how we really work. We have guilt and regret and we don't find that everything we do is particularly great. Our sense of "great" does not line up exactly with doing what our emotions bubble up to choose what is great. Also, what if our will to regret is also strong and enforces itself over the desire to believe Sartre? Some people don't have this guilt and they permit everything within them. I presume that these people have a tremendous sense of self-satisfaction. Well, good for them, but I don't think that's the way I'm going to play the game.

Practical Philosophy

From Nietzsche, the best moment of practical philosophy, or rather, practical psychology, was in his discussion of free will. I can't remember where, but he says that there is no free will just as there is no unfree will. There are only weak and strong wills. And a strong will involves a sort of unification of the individual wills within us toward a singular, endorsed objective. This makes tremendous sense and is a good key to achieving happiness, fulfillment, consistency, etc. But, of course, a commons sense guide could have led you there without all the philosophical broo-hah....saying something like, "in everything we do, part of us wants to do it, another part doesn't, so the trick is getting everybody on board." Yay simple thinking.

From Sartre, my favorite moment of practical psychology comes when he discusses action and how actions retroactively determine for us what we think is right. If you want to know what you really want in life, all you have to do is look at what you actually chose to do. For you only let the strongest urges within you win, what reason is there to not endorse everything you do? The practical part is that it gives an argument for not worrying about what you do before you do it for you'll do what is best anyways. My counter-argument is that our "endorsement" will is a separate will outside of what we actually do. i.e. I may end up over-drinking, but I wouldn't be proud of my actions, and as a result, I'd be unhappy about that decision. Sartre would then argue well, your passion for drinking was stronger and by its strength, you chose to drink. Sure, one could say that on a technical level but that's not how we really work. We have guilt and regret and we don't find that everything we do is particularly great. Our sense of "great" does not line up exactly with doing what our emotions bubble up to choose what is great. Also, what if our will to regret is also strong and enforces itself over the desire to believe Sartre? Some people don't have this guilt and they permit everything within them. I presume that these people have a tremendous sense of self-satisfaction. Well, good for them, but I don't think that's the way I'm going to play the game.

Plastic: Stay On The Scene,

Plastic: Stay On The Scene, Like A Choice Machine ...[P]eople have this strange antipathy for evolution and for materialism. They think that if evolution is true, then they're just animals or automatons — that they won't have freedom and they won't have responsibility, and life will have no meaning. The point of the book is to show that, on the contrary, it's only when you understand life from an evolutionary point of view that you understand what our freedom really is. You realize that it's real. It's different and better than the freedom of other animals, but it's evolved. It's not supernatural.

Discussion on Dennett and his view that free will and determinism is compatible. FINALLY! The key difference is in the distinction between determinism and fatalism. Fatalism is like time is a four dimensional substance that has already been etched. Determinism is the notion that every cause has an effect. Dennett proposes that we're just machines, but "deciding machines" in that we pause, delay, think, and then choose. Of course internally it's just clockwork moving back and forth, and if one were to trace everything, they could figure out what our decision would be, (and probabilistically through quantum mechanics), but THAT itself IS our free will... the emergent behavior of deciding. Sure, it's pre-determined, but that doesn't mean we don't run our decision-making modules and algorithms.

Read it, he explains this distinction better than I do.

Are a priori arguments inevitable?

Are a priori arguments inevitable? Can man exist without something that he holds onto just because. Not because of his own instinct, but, is holding up something a priori an aspect or proof of man's free will? Is the idea that someone will accept Christianity on faith alone, and not because it is right, is that the essence of man? Is man all faith and nothing else? Even as non-religious as Nietzsche was, he always made sure to balance his book by poking at philosophers who had a faith in truth. His criticism was also in the idea that as much truth as the philosophers claimed to have had, they always introduced something a priori somewhere. For Sartre, it's authenticity. For Nietzsche, it's certainty. For Christian's, it's strength of faith. For Mother Teresa, it's the power of love.

The only thing that can be devoid of a priori introductions is math. Unfortunately nobody has a good philosophy that is based completely in mathematical Tautologies. This is why I attempted the formation of the Tautrix. However, a true Tautrix would be irrelevant to man's condition because we don't think in abstract tautologies, we think in terms of emotions, automatic responses, intuition, etc.

It's almost like a priori introductions ARE man. Sartre's Existentialism illustrates this point very well. It is true, we invent what is now to be man. Our action determines what, to us, is real, what is right, and we change all the time. We make everything up. Conjecture is the rule, not the exception.

Impulse v. Spontanaeity

In trying to argue for free will, don't confuse spontaneity with impulse. An impulse is exactly what its name suggests: a pulse. And every pulse needs a current, a medium, and a source.

On Spontanaeity

I don't believe in spontaneous thought. Here's a simple argument:
Okay, have a spontaneous thought...... See! That supposedly spontaneous thought of yours wasn't spontaneous, it occurred precisely after I asked.
But then you respond, "but I can have a thought here, now. BAM. And another one there, soon, finally, now. BAM" Sorry buddy, your "spontaneous" thoughts occurred precisely after you were axed on by my ruse.