Free will and unpredictability

So I'm reading this book "Chaos" by James Gleick about the choas theory. You're probably familiar with the Butterfly Effect - that if a butterfly flaps its wings in New York it changes the weather in, say Tokyo. The idea is that each tiny change in the world induces the whole system to function differently, in an entirely nonlinear fashion such that one small perturbation could have vast consequences. 

I want to combine this with the idea of nature and nurture influences on the self. Our bodies are just a biological consequence of our parents, informed and shaped by our parent and their friends and their community. We make decisions by the way our neurons fire in our brain, and our neurons fire in this way due to either our biology or our environment. I am going to argue that nature and nurture here are not important distinctions. What is important is that they are both ultimately out of our personal control. So, the first human born long ago would make decisions based on factors outside of his control and by doing so he/she directed our future by making small perturbations that would amplify to become the world we know. 

If our decisions truly rest in our genome and with our upbringing, then each decision is dependent on previous ones and if you trace this back to the conception of humanity, you get to a point where the first decision ever must have created all future possibilities. If you trace this idea into the future, you find that we are enmeshed in decisions we have to make because of who we are, and the idea of free will becomes pretty much impossible. 

Do you agree with my logic? Must there be a third influence on decisions in order to permit free will?

Uncertainty in death

Now lets talk about something pretty different - game theory. In game theory the optimum strategy is tit-for-tat: if someone is mean to you, you're mean to them in the subsequent round to punish them. The optimum strategy also includes some degree of forgiveness. Some biologists think that this is the foundation of social behavior - that we interact with those that are consistently nice, punish those who are not... But what I want to explore here is that this tit-for-tat strategy actually only works if you don't know how many rounds there are. That's pretty interesting to me - the game only works if we don't know when it ends. Does that have something to do with why we don't know when we die, otherwise life would breakdown because we wouldn't know how to live? 

So, as I see it there are fundamentally two possibilities. Here I will define God as any force of any type, perhaps purposeful and definitely knowing. Either there is a God and he's decided not to tell us what's up or there's not a God and we have to figure it out if we have any shot at it at all. If there were a God, he would have to have a reason not to want to tell us what's up. Perhaps this tit-for-tat idea of social interaction would break down if we knew. I am not sure if we need to be ignorant in order to want to live, but that's certainly another possibility. It seems possible though that the God has created a system for life that only works if we are ignorant.

Of course, the other God problem is that who created God if not God? But that's another whole topic.

God

Our conceptions of God limit our understanding of consciousness.  

In the West, God -- be it bearded Jehovah or younger Jesus -- is a man, typically portrayed with light skin and a beard.  He interacts with other people, curses them, blesses them, and interferes in their lives when people break his rules.   He controls a piece of the universe called Heaven, and grants entry to people who worship him and who obey him at all times.  

This sounds more like a mob boss than an enlightened divinity.  

Yet walk into most churches (or synagogues, or mosques, or temples -- it doesn't vary that much) and you will hear something along these lines.   Follow these rules, or you will go to Hell.  

Even if you don't believe in God, or are agnostic, it is this image that is supposed to shape your "spiritual" inclination.   

God is presented as something to be feared.  So you see most people today live in fear of God, or live in fear of other people who believe in God, or life in fear of the people who make the rules based on the values of a fearful God.  

If we want to plumb the depths of human consciousness, we have to get rid of these limiting ideas of God.  

It is OK to have a connection with the larger universe and to have a sense of spirituality without subscribing to any particular church or doctrine.   

In fact, spirituality is so unique -- and we as individuals are so unique -- that every person probably has their own idea of the nature of God.  

People don't need to agree about their conceptions of God.  It's OK for there to be a difference of opinion about God.  

The important thing is that people make up their own minds about God (or the lack of a God) and not just blindly follow some belief because it makes them feel better.  

That is not genuine investigation, but simply acting like a sheep.   And our consciousness is too precious to behave like a sheep.

Personally -- I view God as being the mind, and as being the universe as well.  This may seem like a paradox, but to me the mind and the universe are one and the same -- and both are God.  

God is the bridge that connects my intentions, desires, hopes, and prayers to their material manifestation.  

I sit, and quiet my mind, and then I open my mind to all of creation and feel a comfort that all will be well, all can be healed, everything will be OK.  No need to worry.  

In this state, you can formulate an intention and ask that it come true, so long as it is in the best interests of all involved.   And if it is, then it happens.  

God is the connection to all of consciousness.  When you sit by yourself, and you feel the presence of a loved one who may be thousands of miles away -- that moment is God. 

Or when you sit in a garden and can delight in beauty, happy to be alive -- that moment is God.

Our purpose here on this Earth is to obtain ever greater freedom.  Freedom means the defeat of fear, and values promulgated on such fear.  When you confront a fear, and you knock it down, and you obtain greater spiritual and psychological freedom -- that moment is also God. 

And because freedom is always growing, always expanding, always evolving, so too does our own conception of God grow and expand, and evolve in tandem as well.  

Spore: A God Game, now with Evolution!

This upcoming video game looks pretty fantastic, and it may be of interest to this community. You start out as a single-celled organism and evolve your way through time to the point where you can travel through space and colonize the galaxy. Perhaps a little more thought-provoking than Halo. Really, the point here is that you are IN CONTROL OF EVOLUTION. The species you create spread through the internet for other people to find as they travel around the Universe with their own species. Sounds pretty rad.

As always, Wikipedia has tons of information on the game: Spore (video game)

Why the HTE can work now

I'm just going to provide a link to an interesting article about social projects on the internet, because there's no sense in my summarizing it when these quotes do the job:

So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.
[...]
Just to pick one example, one I'm in love with, but it's tiny. A couple of weeks one of my students at ITP forwarded me a a project started by a professor in Brazil, in Fortaleza, named Vasco Furtado. It's a Wiki Map for crime in Brazil. If there's an assault, if there's a burglary, if there's a mugging, a robbery, a rape, a murder, you can go and put a push-pin on a Google Map, and you can characterize the assault, and you start to see a map of where these crimes are occurring.
[...]
Maybe this will succeed or maybe it will fail. The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don't pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible, and I hope that this one succeeds, obviously. But even if it doesn't, it's illustrated the point already, which is that someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn't have imagined existing even five years ago.

With the right tools on the internet, we can use some of those free-time television hours to come up with some really solid thoughts. Now we just need to get those tools in order and maybe we'll be one of the experiments that works...

The whole article is definitely worth reading:
Gin, Television and Social Surplus

Time

From our facebook group discussion, courtesy of Ruth:
So this summer I had a boring data monkey job and I spent a lot of time listening to podcasts about everything. Anyways, one of my favorites is wnyc radiolab, which is two guys who cover a whole bunch of topics that are super interesting. Some of the ones they've done are on the concept of time. They go around an interview legitimate scientists and put together their knowledge in a 1 hour show. It's actually pretty sweet.

Point is, one of their shows on time has an interview with Oliver Sacks who is this crazy British neurologist who writes popular books about case studies of patients who reveal something about the way the human brain works. In the episode on time, they talked to him about this story of two patients he had that perceived time totally differently from normal people. But the weird part is, not only do they think time is moving faster or slower, they actually act faster or slower based on that.

So there was this one guy who looked like he never really moved. If you left him alone for a long time you would come back and he would be frozen in a slightly different position. What Sacks did was tape him for a period of time and then watched it and sped it up. It turned out he was just like wiping his nose, but it took him all day! And then there was a girl who had the exact opposite problem. She talked so fast you couldn't understand her; she caught a ball with record-breaking fast reflexes. Everything in the world for her was just moving super slow. And this is all because some mechanism in the brain got messed up. Pretty cool.

Here's the link if you want to listed to the show. Oliver Sacks also has a book or article about this, but I can't find it again. http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2007/07/15

Options in the Future

At each moment in time, we are making decisions about what each of us individually is doing and each small decision made by each individual changes the options for the future by shaping the world as it exists. There are two fundamental possibilities here, I think: either, at each junction there are infinite possible decisions or there are a finite number of possible decisions - let me discuss the implications of these two possibilities.

Let's say that there are a finite number of possibilities. In this case, if there are options A, B, and C and you choose A, you can never again choose B or C or any of the other options stemming from these. Thus, you have narrowed the possibilities in the future to 1/3 of what they otherwise would have been. Over time then, each set of decisions would further narrow the possibilities and the ultimate implication of this would be that we would approach a single moment in time when there was only one option remaining - the apocalypse? If that event is pre-determined, does that mean we have no free will?

Otherwise, there are infinite options generated at each moment in time and as time passes you are not limiting future possibilities only creating new different sets of possibilities. One of my friends said she'd read something about how some physicists believe that different decisions can have long-term implications, creating parallel paths between people that re-intersect based on an earlier decision.

Let me explain what I mean by parallel paths. For example, Sarah Broudy and I met in Oxford summer camp junior year of high school and were placed two doors apart in the dorm there. We then saw each other admit weekend here at school and then were placed into the same freshman dorm, two doors apart. Our parents met as we were moving in, and we found out that her grandfather taught my father medicine and further our parents had attended the same college and the same classes in college and could reminisce about specific lectures. This theory would apparently suggest that all of these connections may link back to an earlier decision made by, say, her grandmother. That single decision made it more likely that each of these following events would occur. An interesting explanation for a set of pretty improbable events. I'd be interested in if others have heard of this theory and can elaborate or if you have other ideas for why connections like this may arise and what this might imply for our options in the future.