Free will re-redux

Will respond to rest later, but really quick...

Yes, a cheese sandwich is fundamentally a pattern. "Stuff" is composed of patterns - not tiny rocks (materialism).

The idea that material is fundamental is a metaphysical extrapolation of the sensory experience of hard things.
The idea that ideas are fundamental is the metaphysical extrapolation of the sensory experience of soft fuzzy things.

Pattern unites both. It unites subject and object in one concept thereby dissolving hard problem. There is no pattern without subjective observer deciding where to lay down boundaries. There is no pattern without "objective" similarity and difference.

So if we say the fundamental reality is pattern we have subject, object, and choice baked right into reality.

I don't want to reply too deeply until you've gotten the chance to respond to the post - though you can always change your mind [and decide what you've written] is all you want to say!

Anyway, still not sure about the whole pattern thing but it did remind me of this:

Experience and Causation

Steve Esser

I’m re-reading sections of Gregg Rosenberg’s A Place for Consciousness: Probing the Deep Structure of the Natural World. What’s brilliant about the work is that it starts with the Russellian insight about the mind-body dilemma (discussed here) and then “ups the ante” by linking consciousness to other metaphysical puzzles – including those of those of causation and the composition of objects.

Here’s a rough table listing a general feature of the world and the aspect of consciousness it matches up with.

Feature of Nature/Aspect of Consciousness
Intrinsic Properties/Qualitative Content (“Qualia”)
Causation/Experiential Flow
Properties bundled into Objects/Subjective Unity

The world is panpsychist in the sense that the aspects of consciousness are really ubiquitous features of nature as seen from our particular point of view.

Let me say a few words about causation:

With regard to Russell, in The Analysis of Matter he characterized the world as a network of causal events. He describes mental percepts as causal events we participate in, while physical theories are models of causal events we don’t necessarily participate in, but infer via their effects. His proposal of neutral monism is simply based on the fact that we don’t have a reason to think these categories of events are essentially different.

But while physics clearly seeks to describe the causal structure of the world, Russell doesn’t explicitly criticize physical theories for their lack of a full account of causality (unless I missed it, which is very possible). But it is pretty clear that while physics models the causal structure of the world, physics does not provide a theory of causation...

Physical theories as we have known them are compatible with several theories about causality, with philosophers debating their relative merits. Dynamic equations link states with points in time, but they don’t speak to how one state gives rise to the next....

[url=http://guidetoreality.blogspot.com/2010/12/experience-and-causation.html][/url]