Between a Rock and a Hard Place

A particularly philosophical friend of mine and I had a similar train of thought a few weeks ago concerning personal ethics and freedom. She approached it via deterministic self-knowledge, whereas I was looking at it from the tiresome old question of purpose in life. I will use her case as the departure point as it is more general, though I think not explicit on a few points that I was thinking about.

"Knowing who you are means you have a good idea what you're going to do next. Perfect self-knowledge means you can predict precisely what you'll do in response to any situation. But that's equivalent to knowing your future. And knowing your future means giving up free will, because you can see every choice you're going to make." 

~Elizabeth Marston (via Facebook)

Free Will versus Meaning
Self-knowledge thus negatively correlates with phenomenological free will. This holds true for and deterministic vector, including purpose in life. If there is an intrinsic purpose in life, then it functions as a goal for your actions – that is if you are aware of it. If you were to know your purpose in life (if there is one), you would have a fantastic amount of self-knowledge. You would have, in effect, a blueprint for every nontrivial action (which would also incidentally solve most – if not all – issues of personal ethics). The downside of this is that this blueprint reduces you to a slave to your purpose. You becomes an automaton, devoid of [the experience of] free will.

On the other end of the spectrum, having zero self-knowledge causes the problem of being a wild animal, slave to your most base drives, with no way of self-checking. Ethics –personal or otherwise – are not even on your radar. At this hypothetical extreme, memory isn't possible as it is a form of self-knowledge. You are again a mere automaton. Furthermore, you gain an intrinsic purpose: to follow your drives. Les extrémités se touchent, as the French say.

While free will may be a de facto illusion, clearly we do experience free will within the limits of a mixed strategy. The question of where we achieve the optimum output of free will I do not think can ever be definitively answered, and certainly not within the scope of this blog.

Free and Meaningful Tug-of-War
Is free will an important thing? As roughly meaning autonomy and agency, we certainly do seem to value it culturally, though this was not always so. It is not an imperative, though purpose (meaning) is. It could be said that meaning is a prerequisite to free will, as without it you are unable to act (you are without direction, without the ability to evaluate), hence a mixed strategy being optimal as far as free will is concerned. The only way for this to happen requires imperfect or incomplete ("flawed") purposes, meanings or models.

Again we are brought back to the problem of what we should value. We have conceived several times here of pure systems that fully lack phenomenological free will, which incidentally may be more honest if we are to assume determinism to be true. As I've noted elsewhere, the act of the gears turning is experienced as conscious free will, and we as thinking beings cannot escape it either.

So here we are, stuck between two extremes. Finding optimization of whatever ratio of free will and meaning that we feel is right, though no one solution will ever satisfy the problem completely. This is another facet of the human condition. By our very nature, we cannot ever completely win. But perhaps that isn't either here nor there. Perhaps this need is what keeps us going, searching, thinking, acting. We have an action potential that cannot ever be fully discharged until death takes us. We could still achieve all that we do without this, as machines and computers, but – I think – this is the difference of what makes us human.

"He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool." 

~Albert Camus 

Outline

1. Complete free will requires the absence of intrinsic purpose, and vice versa
2. Purpose is approximately equal to meaning, and thus value
• We need values in order to evaluate
• We need to be able to evaluate against some model in order to act
• Purpose is a prerequisite to action, and this free will
• A mixed strategy is required in order for free will to operate
3. We are thinking creatures, and experience "the gears turning" as free will
• We cannot escape free will or the need for meaning

Checksum Values

One argument that keeps coming up against me in conversation against my line of thought is that we have some biological imperative. To address this, I'm going to respond directly to hundun's comments on one of my posts.

The argument summarizes thus:

• The mammalian brain is imperfect due to the lack of refinement form evolution
• Our minds are "like a crapware-saddled virus-ridden Vista-running laptop brought back in time to 1973"
• Human cognition is fundamentally irrational
• Biological drives (survival, reproduction, etc) constitute our basic impulses
• The human mind is not unified
• We are no different from other mammals

Okay, great, I agree with all of this except for the irrational part (to some degree). But I would argue that this model is incomplete. While I am a determinist, I still think that we have the illusion of free will (the experience of the processors chugging away). We have biological drives, but we also effectively (though not actually) have choice. In the words of Sartre, "[people] are condemned to be free." I can choose to rebel against all of my biological drives, stop eating, isolate myself, or commit suicide. I can die for a cause, or make huge sacrifices for the sake of an idea.

Yes, we absolutely have irrational biological drives, but we also have a rational cogito. Our mind is divided, hence why we can feel so divided. The pull of all these parts determines action, as if on a voting system. Your Freudian superego was installed (experimentally and by accident via evolution) to make you a social animal, but went haywire and now you can possess values that are counterproductive to evolutionary reproduction.

You do have choices over your biological drives. You can madly lust after someone, yet never act on your desire, even if given the opportunity to get away with it. Yet another person would take advantage of the situation. Why is that? The cogito portion of the democracy that is your mind can have a pretty strong say in your actions. Often these cogito functions are programmed by the indoctrination of children by their caregivers. This tends to lend itself to the realm of ethics on a social scale. However, as individuals, how can we justify wanting this or that, or valuing what we've learned through authority. Taking authority at face-value can be a very dangerous thing.

My existential crisis was born out of a number of factors that led me to recognize the value nihilism of nature: that existence precedes essence. My body gives me biological rewards by making me feel pleasure when I do certain things that I am programmed biologically to do. But is feeling good the point? Are we mere slaves to our passions? Clearly not, or at least not all of us.

Values essentially sweep through as a diagnostic of our actions. "Is this right?" is what our drives are always asking. It performs a checksum on each part of our being. But when you turn the diagnostic against itself, it can't checksum because it has nothing to check against. All the other people have different values. Our OS was installed without the ability to check if our diagnostic tool is functioning, and everyone is running different plug-ins, so we can't compare to each other.

I think there's a good chance that Douglas Adams was right, and the checksum is 42.

The Schrödinger Imperative

I will be including outlines of the ideas covered at the end of every (philosophical) post in order to make review of the core ideas presented quick, and to remove some of the bias I could create with rhetorical [self-]deception by presenting it in a bare bones, skeleton form.

It's official: I'm trapped. We all are.

For some reason, I am here. I exist, I think, I have awareness, I make choices. I did not decide to be here. How could I? I didn't choose to have choice. But I do. The fact that I think gives my agency. This is also not a choice. It's there, and I use it all the time. To stop having agency would require killing myself (unless I'm missing something), but doing so requires agency too. It would be an act of agency. I cannot simply "turn agency off."

All choices that I make are done on the basis of some justification. If I do something "random," I've really just chosen to do something unexpected. There is no random. I am a machine. The gears and cogs all turn and chug away, and I do things on a basis no different from a wind-up toy. Okay, I'm a pretty complex wind-up toy, but a machine never the less. I agree with Laplace when he said:

"We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of the past and the cause of the future. An intellect which at any given moment knew all of the forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that compose it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit the data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom; for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes"

Perhaps this is what some people mean by "fate." You cannot escape it. With enough understanding of the parts involved, you could predict every little action. I've held for some time that free will is an illusion. Granted, it's an illusion that is necessary for the way we function... but it is still an illusion.

Part of this machinery that constitutes us is (in a virtual sense) the act of evaluation. We take input, evaluate it, and output an action (thought, idea, motion, belief, and so on). But we have this little problem. On what basis do we evaluate? It's quite simple to evaluate things as being bigger or smaller than each other. On a more complex level, it is just as easy to compare things to a prototypical "image" of something, or to say that something is closer or further away from an ideal. But to say that something is better than another, such as that it is better to live or better to get out of bed in the morning (or their inverses), you need to evaluate them on the basis of a personal beliefs called values.

In some sense, you are still comparing things to some "image", it is just an image of value. Where did you get this image? On what basis do you evaluate these images against each other? There needs to be an underlying image, and an image for that image, and so as you spin out ad infinitum (and really: ad absurdum.) You need a basis that is justified somehow. We have a priori truths. These seem to be the only way to go as far as I can tell.

So in order for a person to evaluate any input, they need a set of beliefs called values. Without values, you cannot evaluate, you cannot make decisions, you in effect cannot think (as thinking requires constant choice and evaluation), and then the major premise "I think therefore I am" falls apart. And then what are you? You are inert matter, devoid of thought and life.

But you do not have a choice about that. You do think. Anything that you do now requires choice, and everything that goes with it. If you do, or do not do, anything, you are still in the same trap. It does not require judgement to discern then that resolving this crisis is nothing short of imperative.

Outline:

1. I exist
• I think therefore I am 
2. Thinking is an action
• This is agency
• I cannot "turn off" my agency
• If I did I would have no justification for #1
• The only conceivable way is suicide
• It takes agency to "turn off" agency
• It is a choice (see #3 and #4)
3. Actions all involve choice (do this or not to do this), despite how conscious of a process this is
4. Choices require evaluation
• Evaluation is dependent on values
• One must resolve value nihilism in order to make choices
5. It is imperative that my existential crisis be resolved
• I cannot change #1 without resolving this crisis
• There is no way out
• It is an imperative in order for #1 to hold true