Aquinas' Ways, PSR, Tetralemmic Polarity...

Was thinking about this and I believe it shows what might be a fundamental divide between Chance and Will. Consider yet again Penrose's description of superposition ->

Consider, for example, superposition in quantum theory. How could Schrödinger’s cat be both dead and alive before we open the box?

“An element of proto-consciousness takes place whenever a decision is made in the universe,” he said. “I’m not talking about the brain. I’m talking about an object which is put into a superposition of two places. Say it’s a speck of dust that you put into two locations at once. Now, in a small fraction of a second, it will become one or the other. Which does it become? Well, that’s a choice. Is it a choice made by the universe? Does the speck of dust make this choice? Maybe it’s a free choice. I have no idea.”

The point here isn't whether Penrose is correct about "proto-consciousness", whatever that may be. Rather I simply want to re-emphasize the validity of holding quantum indeterminism as analogous to choice. We can then look at the causal nature of both in parallel, as per Ajum/Mumford noting probalistic causation is a good argument for dispositional causal powers ->

The coin has a tendency to land heads and tails with equal chance, a tendency which manifests itself over a sequence of trails. But this is only a disposition towards such a distribution. It does not necessitate it, as we know when we acknowledge that any actual distribution is possible for any sequence of tosses. Yet the distribution is not entirely contingent either, as we know when we acknowledge that distributions at variance widely from 50:50 are unlikely, proportionate to the number of trails.

The case of probabilistically constrained causation thus corroborates our account. It is noteworthy in so far as the account seems to accord entirely with what we already accept pre-theoretically to be the data of chancy causes.

So a particle's disposition toward particle positions can be influenced by the movement of its macro-object, as when the electron positional probability cloud for every atom making up a ball shifts with the arc of my throw. While there is no direct parallel between physics' quantitative vectors of force and the qualitative influence of an agent's varied mental characteristics, this does seem to be in accord with our lived experience.

From another Ajum & Mumford paper ->

Our view is that free will is certainly compatible with causation. It is not something an agent needs to escape in order to be free. Indeed, how would freewill be possible other than through causation: allowing agents who are active, exercising causal powers in response to the worldly causes that affect them? The problem has been that many have thought the only way causation can work is through necessity and this has led them to assume that free will is threatened by causation per se. We have shown that it is not. Once causation and necessity are separated, you can see that causation is not your enemy.

Even in a mind=brain relationship consciousness can be seen as part of an intrinsic essence, as per Lee Smolin ->

We don't know what a rock really is, or an atom, or an electron. We can only observe how they interact with other things and thereby describe their relational properties.

Perhaps everything has external and internal aspects. The external properties are those that science can capture and describe - through interactions, in terms of relationships.

The internal aspect is the intrinsic essence, it is the reality that is not expressible in the language of interactions and relations. Consciousness, whatever it is, is an aspect of the intrinsic essence of brains.

-Time Reborn

And causation is also, as per this Arvan quote, part of the intrinsic essence of things. And the reflexivity of consciousness is the "I" that holds all the varied mental characteristics - goals, desires, fears, etc. Each characteristic has qualitative dispositional influence, but their sum is not a necessitating factor. Two things to observe here ->

1) Characteristics of an agent are not a complete description of an agent, as per the Further Fact Theory of Identity ->

The problem with the psychological continuity theory is precisely the fact that it treats perfect psychological duplicates of a person as the same person. The problem with this idea –and the reason why the further-fact view seems so compelling –is that it seems perfectly conceivable that a perfect psychological duplicate of a person is not the same person but rather a mere duplicate with an entirely different consciousness. Here is why: each of us seems to experience ourselves not as a set of personality traits but instead as a bare point-of-view–as a “vanishing” subject of experience. This was Kant’s and Wittgenstein’s common point. As Melchert nicely summarizes Wittgenstein’s view:

[Wittgenstein] suggests that if you wrote a book called The World as I Found it, there is one thing that would not be mentioned in it: you. It would include allof the facts you found, including all the facts about your body. And it would include psychological facts about yourself as well: your character, personality, dispositions, and so on. But you –the subject, the one to whom all this appears, the one who findsall these facts –would not be found.

Or, as Wittengstein put it in his own words, “The subject does not belong to the world; rather, it is a limit of the world.”

This is further suggested by Schwartz's OCD treatments, the value of mindfulness, etc as noted in this paper by Schwartz, Stapp, and Beauregard.

2) That we deliberate over choices is at least suggestive that characteristics are not summing up to a final "decision" direction the way we expect from physics.

So if one can accept the above, and accept consciousness and causation are (the only?) two intrinsic properties in any reality due to their simplicity/indivisibility, and accept that Chance is irrational/impossible it would seem to me that one has a basic recipe for free will or more specifically Conscious Possibility Selection. As per Henry Stapp ->

Stapp sees the physical world as a structure of tendencies or probabilities within the world of the mind. He thinks that the introduction of an irreducible element of chance into nature via the collapse of the wave function, as described in most forms of quantum theory, is unacceptable. The element of conscious choice is seen by him as removing chance from nature.

This is Aquinas' 5th Way in a localized sense, that selection of all the things that could happen in favor of a single outcome requires those possibilities to be held in a mind.

In this scenario belief in Chance is belief in a kind of "randomized" Fate, and while one could believe it that IMO is the path to irrationality.

Perhaps a better way is to go back to the Nondualist Tetralemmic Polarity ->

Divine and Local Simplicity, and the Question of Will

Thinking and Feeling, Language and Perception

Scott Roberts

In the "Divine and Local Simplicity" essay, I left open a question, that if fundamentally thinking and feeling are identical, how did it come about that we now distinguish them? I do not have a satisfactory answer to this question, but I think that the answer is tied to the answer to another question: how do referential forms come about, which is to say, how did language come about?

Recall that in that section I distinguished between mathematical thoughts, and, say, the thought of a house, where the difference is that, for example, the thought of a triangle is the triangle, while the thought of a house is not the house. The thought of a house refers beyond itself, while the thought of a triangle does not. The former is referential, and the latter is non-referential. A referential form points to something else, which could be another referential form, a non-referential form, or formlessness. Excluding the last case, what we have is that one form "brings to mind" another. This implies that the second could lie outside of mind. Assuming that nothing is outside of Ultimate Mind, this could only happen in a localized consciousness such as ours. Thus the need for referential form is correlated with the localization of consciousness...

On the other hand, it has been known since Pythagoras that music is highly structured. It can be analyzed mathematically. This makes it, as I see it, also expression of pure thought. And so, one could say that a pure thought is a pure feeling, and a pure feeling is a pure thought. How, then, did impurity arise?

As said at the start, this does not solve the question of how thought and feeling became distinguished. It just states that this question is tied to the question of how localized consciousness came about.

Feser's Fifth: Why his up-to-date version of Aquinas' Fifth Way fails as a proof, and how to make it work

Vincent Torley

Excellent reporting Sci.

I strongly agree with the #2 assertion about objects as part of or emerging from the rules and not magically independent abstractions.  Having the category of information objects and their rules of transformation moves the discussion from historical and current Philosophy arguments to pragmatic and coherent reasoning with out so many abstracts with varying definitions.

In the real world - information objects - such as possible plans and actions are the most outstanding variables predicting outcomes.

Excellent reporting Sci.

I strongly agree with the #2 assertion about objects as part of or emerging from the rules and not magically independent abstractions.  Having the category of information objects and their rules of transformation moves the discussion from historical and current Philosophy arguments to pragmatic and coherent reasoning with out so many abstracts with varying definitions.

In the real world - information objects - such as possible plans and actions are the most outstanding variables predicting outcomes.

I had to go back through the proof as Torley says it is "rules all the way down" a few times before ultimately noting that what he means is not that an object is nothing but its rule-set but rather than its rule-set is part of the nature of the object rather than somehow outside of it.

So ultimately I agree with him on that. I don't know if this Proof of God is ultimately successful - perhaps as successful as any philosophical argument can be? - but I did think his version is a great improvement over Feser's.

I had to go back through the proof as Torley says it is "rules all the way down" a few times before ultimately noting that what he means is not that an object is nothing but its rule-set but rather than its rule-set is part of the nature of the object rather than somehow outside of it.

So ultimately I agree with him on that. I don't know if this Proof of God is ultimately successful - perhaps as successful as any philosophical argument can be? - but I did think his version is a great improvement over Feser's.

Not implying I fully follow his arguments, rule-set  translates for me as structure inherent in an object and is the means for interaction with probable outcomes.  This informational structure is - for me - form that connects to function.

Informational structure (called "the essence" in classical times) corresponds to physical structure.  This is in strong agreement with " part of the nature of the object rather than somehow outside of it."  The outside part of it are the affordances in the informational environment that may interact and be measured probabilistically.  They are complementary, with detection by an agent making an actual connection that changes real-world probability.

Ontological arguments are really tough to win.  I am more of the light-hearted B. Pascal wagering with my mind.  Knowing that in my soul am am just another sinner.