Looping Wor(l)d

I was watching the stream of a conference on quantuum mechanics to see if I could gleam some interesting patterns, something that caught my attention is “QBism”, or: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Bayesianism

So QBism being one of the various models that are actively being considered as plausible explanations for the quantuum mechanics types of phenomena. “Ugliness” in Science measures the amount of unsettling change and perturbations a theory brings to the field. The ideal being “elegant complexity”, which I assume is a quality of god. Summed up in the Occam’s Razor principle, that wants the most amount of phenomenons explained by the smallest amounts of formulas.

In this case, while the technicalities escape me, it seems to me a reformulation of Von Foerster’s “constructivism” mixed with the most magical ideas revolving around the “collaborative universe” crackpot theory.

Since this particular theory seems limited to explain quantuum paradoxes then its confirmation might have a milder impact on “reality”, but the question is always the same: how can my “belief” actually affect the probabilistic outcome? How can the model itself transition from the unobservable magical “small”, to actual concrete and observable reality?

But in this case the interesting part is about fitting the problem into another. From an article I found, some of the suggestive quotes:

Danish physicist Niels Bohr, insisted in a 1929 essay that the purpose of science was not to reveal “the real essence of the phenomena” but only to find “relations between the manifold aspects of our experience”.

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People argue to this day about whether wavefunctions are real entities, like stones or ripples on a pond, or mathematical abstractions that help us to organize our thinking, like the calculus of probabilities.

Fuchs and Schack adopt the latter view. They take a wavefunction to be associated with a physical system by an agent — me, for example, based on my past experience. I use the wavefunction, following rules laid down by quantum mechanics, to calculate the likelihood of what I might experience next, should I choose to probe further. Depending on what I then perceive, I can update the wavefunction on the basis of that experience, allowing me to better assess my subsequent expectations.

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As another Viennese investigator even more famous than Schrödinger — Sigmund Freud — put it in 1927: “The problem of a world constitution that takes no account of the mental apparatus by which we perceive it is an empty abstraction.”

The actual papers sound even uglier:

QBism personalizes the famous dictum of Asher Peres. The outcome of an experiment is the experience it elicits in an agent. If an agent experiences no outcome, then for that agent there is no outcome. Experiments are not floating in the void, independent of human agency. They are actions taken by an agent to elicit an outcome. And an outcome does not become an outcome until it is experienced by the agent. That experience is the outcome.

I’ve recently finished watching a rather popular anime series called “Madoka Magica”, with an eye in particular to its symbolism. It basically is for the magical girls genre what Evangelion was for the big robots anime. A deconstruction of the medium spiced up with a spark of modern realism.

The ending of Madoka Magica is an ending self-aware of the existence of Evangelion. Actually the whole series is, and it can be seen as a: “what if Shinji was a magical girl?.” In many ways Madoka Magica is an answer to Evangelion. It is far less dense and pretentious. There are no sidetracks and this makes it quite straightforward and maybe simplistic. It can be quite heavy on symbolism, but whereas Evangelion draws its lifeblood from its metaphysical and metaphorical depth, in Madoka this level is subservient to the story and merely adding a rather shallow psychological layer. The symbols exist in a one to one relationship without some higher or elusive spiritual meaning. But that also means everything is self-contained and it isn’t more than what it appears to be. So, taken as a whole, the story is more coherent even if it ends again in the purely metaphysical.

You can notice this pattern I described in the use of symbolism. Where Evangelion didn’t shy away from overt Kabbalistic symbolism, Madoka Magica basically reproduces the exact same scenes, but without openly referencing them. So for example you still get the Tree of Life, but it looks different:

Compared to Evangelion’s own version, that doesn’t dissimulates its origin:

And you get Evangelion Sephirotic wings around the earth too, but they also look different (and are consistent with that mythological/psychological look and meaning that goes through the series):

Which is still only a very simplified and blander version of what Evangelion did:

But what made me write this post was this explanation of the ending (just the very first link I came across) that mentioned a typical time paradox:

If Madoka destroys her own witch , doesn’t that create a time paradox?

My good friend Catcher answers this marvelously well. “This is best answered in a reference to the ageless question “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” The idea behind the question is of circular logic: the chicken lays the egg, but the egg houses the developing chicken. Madoka’s disappearance can be explained in a similar fashion. After Madoka gathers all the grief from the mahou shoujo, she literally has nothing else to do rather than to house this grief, which takes the form of a giant soul gem that we see take the form of a world-devouring witch. Her wish, however, mandates her to destroy herself in her witch form (which would be in her own immediate future), thus eliminating her from the plane of existence that Homura is in. She’s essentially created a paradox for herself, thus why she can’t take a material form.

This type of paradox is the standard in time travel sci-fi stories, but I remember I used it to give a scenario on consciousness. What if we reach a point where we truly know everything and so can control everything about conscious experience. The “singularity” so to speak. My idea is that “truth” ceases to exist. It’s truth itself to be made virtual. Meaning that the pattern that is created, is similar to the one described here about the time paradox.

Think for example to the hypothetical scenario where human beings continue to exist “forever”. Eventually they will be able to develop “total knowledge”. Meaning that their knowledge becomes equal to the totality of the system. Meaning, as explained in the previous posts, being equal to god (also known as the “Omega point”). So what if “god” isn’t the entity that was before the beginning and that created the world, but was instead an entity in the FUTURE, that got control and gave origin to a new cycle? The time paradox is repeated here: we need a “timeline” that leads humanity up to acquire total knowledge, but at that point total knowledge means that “reality” and “time” become relative and virtual. Meaning that the timeline that lead up to the singularity is cut away and sealed. It ceases to exist. Only a circular, independent virtuality is left.

And this was also my interpretation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Quoting the actual end:

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

The idea of this ladder that you use to reach some elevated place and the idea that the ladder itself has to vanish after it has been used, is to me the same as the time paradox, where there’s a history that has to lead up to an event, an history that then is cut away and vanishes when a circularity is triggered and made independent from the rest.

While scrolling tat page I also noticed these two quotes:

The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world.

The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit—not a part of the world.

That again seem to relate with my idea of Free Will as an occluded horizon. An imposed limit, as metaphorically described in Kabbalah, opposed to the “truth” of a continuous, undivided world.

Finally, both Madoka Magica and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest are founded on this idea of human emotions as an endless source of energy that can defy entropy, in DFW’s case especially as a self-feeding circularity (and also with obvious sense of humor).

Let’s sum the previous posts on Free Will into a system of overlapping patterns, and formulate god as a formal system.

God = origin of creation = totality (one and boundless) = pure light.

Light = information. Wholeness of creation = totality of information (knowledge).

Totality of information = omniscience = providence = nature.

Totality of information = god.

Partiality = Point of View (wedge, slice) = pain and suffering (lack of understanding).

Pain is the direct consequence of lack of wholeness. You are bound to your personal life and egoism, separate from the rest of nature. You versus the world. The inside of the point of view, versus the outside/alien. Egoism = partiality.

Partiality = partial information = concealed light/concealed god = can’t see/can’t understand.

Free Will = not-god.

Why Free Will is antithesis of god? Because total of information equals deterministic world (everything behaves following laws of nature). Science, as the external point of view (and so not partial), declares lack of Free Will. Hence god cannot give freedom of choice, unless through a partiality.

In order to FEEL and BELIEVE THE FEEL, you need to be like in a dream state: believing the dream. A dream like a veiled truth. Experiencing limits. Without limits = omniscience. No Free Will.

So formally this equals the religious formulation: in order to give freedom of choice and Free Will, god had to conceal himself (omniscience, total point of view, wholeness). The totality of god is opposed to the partiality of man. But it’s that closed, occluded perspective that grants us the CHOICE. God can’t interfere, we decide our morality, we decide our laws. WE HAVE TO. There’s no external system that tells us what’s absolutely right or wrong, being concealed from god/knowledge, we have the imposition to decide for ourselves. Otherwise, if we all had omniscience, we would all knew what was the right thing to do, and we would all agree on that. Because totality of knowledge = wholeness. There’s no discord in the totality, as there’s no discord in god. There’s one voice. Quoting Kabbalah: “He who knows all mysteries will testify that he will not turn back to folly.”

Being freed of pain means exiting the occluded perspective. Pain is always transitory if you know what it is meant to be, and if you can transcend from it. Leaving behind the misery of the lack of light (lack of knowledge, lack of motives and understanding). But it’s only the limited perspective that grants that freedom.

It’s as if god (or the formulation of the system as it is) is saying: there wasn’t any other way.

Free Will comes with pain because Free Will comes from partiality of information. Partiality is pain, but so is Free Will.

Free Will is the antithesis of god. It is only a mechanism of life that operates through partiality (or dichotomy from nature, as in “self” versus “nature”, or humanity versus hostile external world).

As science develops, we discover more and more that Free Will doesn’t exist in this system of nature. It’s just an illusion. Religion already anticipated this fact, because religion knew that the truth was the wholeness of nature, and this wholeness didn’t admit true, non-illusory partiality within.

So science only declares what can eventually happen: Free Will can only be lost, not achieved. Which is the ultimate destination declared by religion as well: reunion with god. Science reveals the truth: consciousness is the illusion. Exactly as religion declares mortal life as illusion. For science and religion both, we belong to the wholeness. The partiality of life is the illusion.

Hence science only defines the destination. It’s the voice beyond the veil of existence. Concealment. Hidden light.

If you want to put this in the most brutal way, then you can say that both religion and science have the exact same idea on “death”: transience. Not because you appear into some metaphysical afterworld, but because consciousness was always an illusion. Occluded horizon, like a soap bubble. You always were part of a bigger system, unite with it, and so you always were and always will be with it and part of it. What dies is only consciousness. And, again, that was mere illusion like a dream.

The religious “heaven” was always an image, a concrete formulation of an abstract idea: wholeness with god. Hence religion always told the truth, through metaphor.

Or: science is equal to religion without metaphor.

Since I know nothing (Jon Snow) I can come up with the most absurd theories by just playing with patterns and generalizing them. And sometimes I even get some nice intuitions, whether revelatory or merely fun from a mythological perspective.

The fun part isn’t when you simply make whimsical associations, but when the whimsical associations actually get confirmed and produce more “sense” on their own. As if you merely try to see if a piece fits in the puzzle, and then it really does and tells you more than you were expecting.

So let’s make wild associations and see what fun comes out.

I watched an hour long video of a conference with Sean Carroll that I truly recommend because it’s one of those rare things that explain complex science while making it crystal clear (without losing too much precision, I hope). In this case it was an update on how science sees reality thee days, and the Higgs boson in particular:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwdY7Eqyguo

After that I went reading on his blog some more complex and convoluted stuff about quantuum fluctuations.

I really can’t follow that stuff well, but I try to focus on the macro patterns that seem to come out.

So, just for fun, I propose four different, totally gratuitous associations.

1- My interpretation of that blog post, or what it seems to come down, is that quantuum fluctuations don’t seem an intrinsic property of a field or object, but the result of an interaction. In this case observation. “what we call “quantum fluctuations” aren’t true, dynamical events that occur in isolated quantum systems. Rather, they are a poetic way of describing the fact that when we observe such systems”.

More specifically he explains:
It has nothing to do with consciousness or intelligence (of course). An “observation” in quantum mechanics happens whenever any out-of-equilibrium macroscopic system becomes entangled with the quantum system being measured. It will then decohere (become entangled with the wider environment), which causes a splitting of the wave function into separate branches.

That I transformed into:
it’s like I’m seeing the object a little different because it’s as if I look at it from a certain angle. If I change my angle of observation, then the object changes. So this “fluctuation” depends on the angle.
Or:
the macroscopic system has a kind of “imprint” that defines “where it comes from”. Like in science fiction usually is defined as a “vibration”, with parallel words having different vibrations or phases. So it seems you say that when an observation occurs, the entanglement happens because it’s the fingerprint of the macroscopic system that gives a peculiarity to the thing observed.

Here the pattern (if you’ve seen the video linked above): what if the “angle” of observation, or the branches that compose the multiverse, is dependent on the “height” of the Higgs field in respect to all the other fields? As if that field defines a particular wavelength that differentiates a world from the next. The fingerprint vibration.

I was just recently reading the “Otaku Tower” and it definitely had fun playing with these ideas. Here’s an actual quote (and first layer of actual mythology):

“We only know how things work in this world. We assume the workings of this world are absolute. But what if there were a great number of other worlds and it turned out the rules of this world are great exceptions compared to the other worlds?”

“But we do not know of any other worlds, so we can only assume they would be the same as us.”

A bitter smile appeared on Ooshiro’s lips when he heard that response.

“True,” the old man said. “But another world is another world. They are fundamentally different. What we think is simply ‘how things are’ and what the other worlds think is simply ‘how things are’ are fundamentally different.”

“Are you saying,” Sayama looked down at his feet, “there is a world where this is how gravity works?”

Ooshiro nodded, walked over to the opposite window, and stood on it. He looked straight up toward Sayama.

“The ten other worlds and this world are perceived as individual gears and so we refer to them as such. 1st-Gear through 10th-Gear all had their own unique characteristics. And do you know what we called this power of ‘how things are’?” Without waiting for an answer, Ooshiro said, “Concepts. We called them concepts! They are a power that can control even the laws of physics. They are the ultimate reason behind everything. That is what concepts are!”

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“That was a Concept Text. It is made by gathering inferior reproductions of an extracted concept. Each individual concept is very weak, but it can be heard as a voice once it reaches the level of a Concept Text. This space also has several weaker concepts added on as well, but they cannot be heard as a voice.” He continued. “When an out of phase space has concepts added to it, it is known as a Concept Space. We think of a concept’s identity as a variable fixed-period vibration wave that we call a string vibration.”

—
Ooshiro had said an alternate world was a world with different concepts. In that case…

“So alternate worlds are worlds with different string vibration frequencies?”

“Yes. And everything in any of the worlds has a string vibration for their world and a string vibration for the object itself. The one for the world we call the parent string vibration and the one for the individual we call the child string vibration.”

Sayama nodded and said, “So is it like a numerator and denominator? The denominator tells you what Gear they belong to and the numerator tells you what the individual is.”

“Yes. If the numerator differs, it is a different individual. If the denominator differs, it may be the same existence but from a different world. These alternate worlds are not parallel. They exist in multiple phases atop each other. According to the records, a ‘gate’ that alters one’s parent string vibration is needed to move to and from different Gears.”

2- The second pattern is an association with the property of Free Will I defined in previous posts: the limited horizon that makes impossible to acquire knowledge to deny free will. This claim reveals already a pattern similarity: Bakker’s BBT. This formulation of Free Will relies of the impossibility of integrating knowledge. So integrating information. Bakker’s BBT is all about consciousness not being able to access (and so integrate) information. But I’ll get to this later, with its own patter.

In this case instead the pattern of a closed perspective seems to match a pattern in actual physics: Complementarity What was surprising for me was finding the concept actually /present/ in physics. Even if it’s applied to a different context, this concept exists. It’s actual, accepted science. What matches isn’t the details, nor it’s a way to use the murkiness of quantuum mechanics to imply some metaphysical properties. Nope. It’s the pattern. Sean Carroll brings it down to the ground again:
“For black holes, complementarity was taken to roughly mean “you can talk about what’s going on inside the black hole, or outside, but not both at the same time.” It is a way of escaping the paradox of information loss as black holes evaporate. You throw a book into a black hole, and if information is not lost you should (in principle!) be able to reconstruct what was in the book by collecting all of the Hawking radiation into which the black hole evaporates. That sounds plausible even if you don’t know exactly the mechanism by which happens. The problem is, you can draw a “slice” through spacetime that contains both the infalling book and the outgoing radiation! So where is the information really? (It’s not in both places at once — that’s forbidden by the no-cloning theorem.)”

I can’t really track and resolve the detail here, but there seem to be this idea of a limit, a horizon. My pattern-matching simply suggest that this could say something about the information horizon that defines Free Will in my formulation. Free Will is theoretically possible because information that proves it (Free Will) wrong can’t be accessed. It’s “either or”. Complementary information whose integration DEPENDS on the point of view. Where the point of view imparts authority, so reality.

3- Let’s now match this pattern to Kabbalah, because it’s hanging there, so close. The first association is the simplest possible. Science works with “information”, Kabbalah with “light”. It’s not even pattern matching, they are really just formulations of the same, light IS information, as we know.

What is physical reality according to Kabbalah (and also a bunch of other religions)? Concealed light. The upper world, where light is pristine, is spirituality, whereas the physical world, where light isn’t pure and is instead concealed, is Malkuth. The sephirot at the bottom of the tree. The Kingdom.

Why is there pain in the world? Answering with a non-answer: because the light is concealed, otherwise a pure light would be void of bad feelings or “wrongs”. This transforms into: why I feel pain? Because I’m not omniscient (I don’t know the reason of pain). Because all pain is justified as long it can heal. As long it leads somewhere better. As long there’s revelation at the end. As long it can be salved, left behind, and a life lifted to a better world. As long it’s revealed as just one part of a better whole.

Some quotes from a Kabbalistic text:

“42. Indeed, you should know that the reason for our great distance from the Creator and that we are so prone to transgress His will is for but one reason. It became the source of all the torment and the suffering that we suffer and for all the sins and the mistakes that we fail in.

Clearly, by removing that reason we will be instantly rid of any sorrow and pain. We will immediately be granted adhesion with Him in heart, soul and might.”

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Thus, understanding His providence is the reason for every good, and the lack of understanding is the reason for every evil. It turns out that this is the whole axis that all the people in the world circle, for better or for worse.

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4. Now you can understand the words of our sages about the verse, “therefore choose life.” It states: “I instruct you to choose the part of living, as a person who says to his son: ‘Choose for yourself a good part in my land.’ He places him on the good part and says to him: ‘Choose this for yourself.’” It is written about this, “O Lord, the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup, Thou maintainest my lot.” You placed my hand on the good fate, to say: “This take for you.”

The words are seemingly perplexing. The verse says, “therefore choose life.” This means that one makes the choice by himself. However, they say that He places him on the good part. Thus, is there no longer choice here? Moreover, they say that the Creator puts one’s hand on the good fate. This is indeed perplexing, because if so where then is one’s choice?

Now you can see the true meaning of their words. It is indeed true that the Creator Himself puts one’s hand on the good fate by giving him a life of pleasure and contentment within the corporeal life that is devoid of content, filled with torment and pain. One necessarily departs and escapes them when he sees a tranquil place, even if it seemingly appears amidst the cracks. He flees there from this life, which is harder than death. Indeed, is there a greater placement of one’s hand by Him than this?

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“Are not these evils come upon us because our God is not among us?”

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“The reward is according to the pain.”

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“When He who knows all mysteries will testify that he will not turn back to folly.”

In general the idea here is somewhat typical. The pain is necessary from this perspective only to “know good”. Think of it as a learning process. There’s ideally always a benevolent hand that guides us. The benevolence is that the pain is merely necessary, but not the end. Yet, in order for this lesson to work and be truly understood, “the hand that guides” can’t be seen. It needs to be concealed or otherwise we would know it’s all a trick. Think about dreams. They only “work” as long you are immersed in them and truly believe it’s an authentic experience, and not merely a dream.

In order for this to happen, you need not to know. The concealment is necessary. The perspective needs be partial instead of total. In order to “feel”, you need to divide from the whole. Hence the reason why god supposedly created humanity, by dividing himself, Adam Kadmon. Hence why pain is necessary: it’s the partiality to cause pain. Whenever you are rejoined to the “whole”, all pain is erased. You are back with god.

This is not only a religious pattern, but also what I formally described in my formulation of Free Will. It is a partiality. Consciousness feels pain because it feels itself as “stranger” from nature. Divided from it. Nature is hostile to us, as if we are aliens in this world, fighting it with all our strength. Banishing, cursing it. Everything happens because we cannot reach and feel the flow of nature. If we die, our world dies. We cling to our life because we cling to our perspective. We die and the world dies with us, because we are no more. It’s a self versus everything else. Or: a self that perceives itself as separate.

Separate from Nature, separate from god, from light, from eternity. Just a small piece of “egoism” and desire. The Will to Receive. Endlessly. Give it to me. I.

4- The last pattern is the information horizon and Blind Brain Theory. Bakker says consciousness is merely illusion because it cannot integrate information about itself. Hence it’s all a distorted impression of the world.

My actual challenge is: what if we turn this upside down? My formulation of Free Will DEPENDS on the lack of information. Or better: the impossibility to integrate that information.

The pattern here emerges before the ideas themselves. It’s the state of concealed light that grants us the first person perspective (and pain). Omniscience (god or science) is merely the wholeness of the process, from whom we are separate. We are strictly vessels that have Free Will because information cannot be integrated.

If information is theoretically possible to integrate, and so accordingly to BBT you achieve a more precise and realistic knowledge of how consciousness works, then you escape this condition, open onto some sort of “singularity”. But I’m saying that this can’t happen, because it can’t formally happen. It’s not merely part of the progress of science because the boundary here isn’t a boundary of knowledge, but the boundary of the actual box we live in.

As if we are back to the concept of complementarity in physics. You cannot integrate these two levels. The horizon of reality occludes the light. You can project points beyond, but these still appear on OUR SIDE. Like stars painted on a dome. These stars are theoretical holes that lead beyond, but factually they are only theories of holes, ideas.

You don’t get to feel what’s outside the dome. Only the possibility of it. And whether you walk with faith or cynicism, you are still only various degrees of miserable.

A follow-up.

Because that framework is so powerful it also leads to other revelations. What Gödel represents for math, he also represents for science.

Science depends on a fixed, independent world, where theories evolve because they can be tested on reality. So reality needs not be mutable. Those rules governing its events need to have the totality of control (and, if there are changes, then the rules have to account for that change). Nothing metaphysical can bleed through, obviously.

But once again science exists only if the world is finite. Only if this world has an “inside” but no outside. Because if the system of the world is contained within a bigger super-system(*), then science would have to embrace that larger system to count for all phenomena. So it’s again the necessity for a one-sided space. The Klein bottle. Science cannot allow for something external (something outside its grasp). And if something external is actually discovered (you could make a case for quantum physics) then it needs to be brought back in, so that science reaches out and includes, integrates. So that the practice of science and theory-making can get closer to the actual ideal of Science: explain everything with no omissions or gaps. Science has the liking of an omniscient light cast upon the world.

From another perspective: science is valid only as long no outside is found (or: only until science conquered everything and there’s nothing left “outside”). Its determinism holds only as long the world is indeed finite and one-sided. Leading directly to Gödel’s paradox (no system seems to be able to fully close itself). If you think about it, it mimics the perspective of “free will”. Free will is possible only UNTIL an outside claims it false. Or: the perspective remains valid only if the wall that defines it, is breached. It exists because it doesn’t. Science postulates determinism, determinism negates free will, on the premise that if the system is closed and one sided, then free will has no leverage, because a mind only exists within the system and so slave to its rules. In determinism the mind is moved, not moving. But in the same way we are vulnerable to science (it denies subjectivity through hard reality and facts, it debunks faiths and beliefs), so science is vulnerable to its own “outside”. Because science for us represents a similar “outside”.

But let’s avoid the ambiguity held in the idealism of language. Let’s call the science that describes the physical world as we know it as Science-1. If a bigger system of reality is then discovered that has total control over the physical world as we knew it, then it’s obvious that Science-2 totally invalidates Science-1. If before we thought Science-1 had the total control (of description) of reality, then instead we discovered that Science-1 was merely under total control of Science-2. Just another slave. Formally, again it’s information from the outside breaching in, demonstrating that Science-1 wasn’t a closed system. The same happens with out mind/consciousness. Experience says that our one sided view is the whole thing. We feel as we have control of ourselves and freedom of choice. But then external knowledge proves us this may be just an illusion, and that the brain is also subject to the rules of the physical world. The problem is that what is “legal” in the example above, isn’t legal in this one. We can’t use that information.

So how is it possible to have both? How can Free Will be made compatible with Determinism? From my point of view, and this framework, it’s a matter of handling the perspectives, because mixing them leads to the paradox that generates the incompatibilities themselves. Science demands a one sided space, that it can fully dominate. Human beings, free will or not, are systems that exist within the “system of the world”, so the domain science casts its claim on. Through science we access knowledge of the world outside of us. Hypothetically even knowledge that unsettles us, like the demonstration that our perception is skewed, or entirely false. But we lack the authority to ACT on that knowledge. We simply discovered how things always were and always will be. So while Free Will is explained away, it still doesn’t render us empty of consciousness. Formally the discovery has no power on us. Meaning: the discovery of us lacking free will couldn’t possibly motivate something like a change in law practices and morality, because we don’t have the Free Will to deal directly with those things and modify them.

Determinism basically says that us, as observing systems, were always “system”. Religion actually explains this much better: we are all part of the same thing, something like spiritual unity with the entire creation. Yet we perceive ourselves as a life with a very narrow perspective (and needs, and selfish desires). Consciousness only sees itself with an idea of “identity”. This perspective can be judged false by information that comes from the outside (science) but it cannot be invalidated. It’s like we are a robot that is programmed to go on its course, able to access knowledge of the impossibility of acting otherwise. So this isn’t a “stage”, like recognizing a lack of free will in order to truly achieve it. It’s just knowledge with no power, invisible. Not there. It’s illusion. Because knowledge that creates no difference is knowledge that does not exist. The lack of free will is itself pure illusion. Why? Because the perspectives get mixed. From our perspectives our actions depend on what we decide. We can’t suddenly stop doing that. Nor the reasons why we do this and that, or the way we organize ourselves, can change on the knowledge of lacking free will. So, again, we can’t use that information. Following that, we cannot not-act. We cannot surrender, or even modify, the free will we think we have.

There are two possible scenarios or ideal worlds. One were we gain some sort of enlightenment and reach some spiritual betterment where we can achieve true free will. The other where we “let it go”, in the sense that we entirely give up the illusion and really start feeling ourselves as the robots lacking will we are. The point is: neither of the two is possible. The first is not possible because we can’t exit the system. The second isn’t possible because robots have to do their thing. What we currently call Free Will isn’t an ideal, but simply us “doing our thing” in the way we always did it. It’s a relative, yet inescapable perspective. It’s fourth wall breaching. Knowledge not possible. So “lack of free will” merely defined the EXACT same thing we until now called “free will”. We swapped the *term*, but what it points to remains the same.

Practically, for us, knowledge of lack of free will doesn’t change the description of the free will we actually have, it changes *what it is*. But being the description the same, it continues doing and behaving the exact same way as before. It continues to appear the same way. Think about this: the “qualia” of consciousness has been described as the perception of a one-sided space (and again the requirement of this type of space to issue the control). Or: lack of perception of what falls beyond the light (of consciousness). Scientific knowledge is just about awareness that there’s something beyond these boundaries. But this knowledge defines and frames the space, it doesn’t remove it. Even though “science” doesn’t merely claim to be a dominating side, but also that no other side can exist, since science is always inclusive and totalitarian.

In the end it bogs down to something truly simple: does a character in a book have free will? Nope. Because we know there’s an author that actually decided what that character does and says. Yet, if you “ask” the character he will explain what he does and what he says in the context of his own “free will”, so the actual motivations of someone thinking himself as a real person. Which one the correct perspective? Depends. You look from the outside and you know it all depends on the writer. Yet if you ever care about a book it is because you are interested in the perspective in there. “As if”. Pretending to see from the inside of that world as if there’s no other outside. That world only exists and matters as long there’s someone willing to be there. A tautology: the perspective is valid as long it is valid. Which is a recursion. A loophole.

(*)
It is also funny to consider that if there’s a super-system that governs reality as we know it, it’s possible that also determinism as we know it is proven entirely false. With this hypothetical entity continuously poking things within our system, at its whims (but in a way that is hidden to us, because it sits in the super-system and is unperceived in ours, like a form of spirituality). Yet we would likely be entirely under the effect of the super-system’s determinism and its rules. It’s just *our* determinism that would be proven false (or merely encapsulated and then occluded, just a spectrum). Which is a variation on the theme of “why is god shaped in the liking of a human?”, or, why should the super-world, and its governing rules, be anything like we see in ours?