Free Will and Will to Power by Mike Hockney Published by Hyperreality Books Copyright Mike Hockney 2014 The right of Mike Hockney to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review.
Quotations Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will. Jawaharlal Nehru We must believe in free will, we have no choice. Isaac Bashevis Singer Free will carried many a soul to hell, but never a soul to heaven. Charles Spurgeon Free will is an illusion. People always choose the perceived path of greatest pleasure. Scott Adams As far as I can see, it s not important that we have free will, just as long as we have the illusion of free will to stop us going mad. Alan Moore God, our genes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code at an ancient terminal there s no way free will can ever exist if we as individuals are the result of some external cause. Orson Scott Card Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will. Georg C. Lichtenberg You say: I am not free. But I have raised and lowered my arm. Everyone understands that this illogical answer is an irrefutable proof of freedom. Leo Tolstoy
Table of Contents Free Will and Will to Power Quotations Table of Contents Introduction The Turing Test Schopenhauer Confirmation Bias Autistic Scientists The Astonishingly Bad Hypothesis The Definitional Crisis The Confederacy of Dunces Quantum Entanglement Hypotheses Non Fingo The Mind Aseity Networked Causation Psychopaths Why Monads Are Inherently Free The Neuroscience Fallacy The Start of the Chain New Mysterianism Fatalism How Things Start Pre-Socratic Panpsychics Quantum Incompatibilism? The Intelligible World The Death Equation Slapstick Rewinding the Universe Causal Closure Don t Listen To Your Professor Causal Closure II The Neuroscience Blind Spot The Matrix Exterior People Dante and Catholicism The Gospel According to Schopenhauer The Inner World Tautology The Unexpected! Waiting to be Reincarnated
The Horror, the Horror Mathematical Destiny The God Point The Alienation of God The Darwinist Fallacy Sisyphus and the Unending Task The Demon of Eternal Recurrence Jim Morrison and Freedom The Singularity and Creation The Koranic Moon Landing?
Introduction Is the most self-evident fact of your life also the greatest illusion of your life? You might think you are free, but you will find a host of intellectuals telling you it s impossible. You are a marionette, they say. You have never once performed a free action. You only imagine you have. What an imagination you have! Not that you have any choice over what you imagine. You re just a machine, after all. Are you controlled by the will of God? Are you the helpless puppet of scientific forces over which you have no control? Do the Fates stand over your shoulder, dictating everything you do? Do you have a destiny that no power can alter? Were you predestined for heaven or hell before you were even born? How, exactly, can you be free? What does freedom even mean? What on earth is free will? Do you really know that you have it, or do you just delude yourself that you do, while always doing what you were inevitably going to do? If you are made of nothing but atoms obeying inexorable scientific laws how can you possibly be free? How can unfree atoms produce free human beings? Isn t that a simple impossibility? There is only one way in which you can be free. You must be as old as existence itself, i.e. eternal. That means that nothing caused you and nothing created you. It means that you are an autonomous agent, equipped with your own causation. You yourself cause things to happen. As poet William Ernest Henley famously said, you are the master of your fate and the captain of your soul. For you to be free, it must be false that you live in a scientific materialist world. Only then can it be true that you are not merely imagining that you are free. This book explains how you really are free, and you are emphatically not experiencing the most bizarre fantasy of all time, constructed by mindless, dead atoms that have never once fantasised. You are free because you have no master, because you have existed forever, because you are an infinite soul with infinite power. What is an immortal, indestructible soul? It s a mathematical mind a monad. It s an immaterial singularity, outside space and time. It s a frequency domain, defined not by God, but by the God Equation. You yourself are a soul. And that s exactly why you are free. No machine can ever be free. Nothing born in time can be free. You may think that you yourself were born in time, but you weren t. Your body was created at a specific time, but not your soul. Your soul was never created at all and doesn t exist in time. It s eternal. Free Will by Galen Strawson The question of free will remains one of the most fiercely debated in the whole of philosophy. Galen Strawson provides an excellent introduction to the main positions that philosophers have adopted: ***** Free will is the conventional name of a topic that is best discussed without
reference to the will. It is a topic in metaphysics and ethics as much as in the philosophy of mind. Its central questions are What is it to act (or choose) freely?, and What is it to be morally responsible for one s actions (or choices)? These two questions are closely connected, for it seems clear that freedom of action is a necessary condition of moral responsibility, even if it is not sufficient. Philosophers give very different answers to these questions. Consequently they give very different answers to two more specific questions, which are questions about ourselves: (1) Are we free agents? and (2) Can we be morally responsible for what we do? Answers to (1) and (2) range from Yes, Yes, to No, No via Yes, No and various degrees of Perhaps, Possibly, and In a sense. (The fourth pair of outright answers, No, Yes, is rare, but it has a kind of existentialist panache, and appears to be embraced by Wintergreen in Joseph Heller s novel Closing Time, as well as by some Protestants). Prominent among the Yes, Yes sayers are the compatibilists. They have this name because they hold that free will is compatible with determinism. Briefly, determinism is the view that the history of the universe is fixed: everything that happens is necessitated by what has already gone before, in such a way that nothing can happen otherwise than it does. According to compatibilists, freedom is compatible with determinism because freedom is essentially just a matter of not being constrained or hindered in certain ways when one acts or chooses. Suppose one is a normal adult human being in normal circumstances. Then one is able to act and choose freely. No one is holding a gun to one s head. One is not being threatened or manhandled. One is not drugged, or in chains, or subject to a psychological compulsion like kleptomania, or a post-hypnotic command. One is therefore wholly free to choose and act even if one s whole physical and psychological makeup is entirely determined by things for which one is in no way ultimately responsible starting with one s genetic inheritance and early upbringing. Compatibilism has many sophisticated variants, but this is its core, and to state it is to see what motivates its opponents, the incompatibilists. The incompatibilists hold that freedom is not compatible with determinism. They point out that if determinism is true, then every one of one s actions was determined to happen as it did before one was born. They hold that one can t be held to be truly free and finally morally responsible for one s actions in this case. Compatibilism is a wretched subterfuge..., a petty word-jugglery, as Kant put it. It entirely fails to satisfy our natural convictions about the nature of moral responsibility. The incompatibilists have a good point, and may be divided into two groups. First, there are the libertarians, who wish to answer Yes, Yes to questions (1) and (2). Libertarians hold that we are indeed free and fully morally responsible agents, and that determinism must therefore be false. Their great difficulty is to explain why the falsity of determinism is any better than determinism, when it comes to establishing our free agency and moral responsibility. For suppose that not every event is determined, and that some events occur randomly, or as a matter of chance. How can this help with free will? How can our claim to moral responsibility be improved by the supposition that it is partly a matter of chance or random outcome that we and our actions are as they are? This is a very difficult question for libertarians. The second group of incompatibilists are less sanguine. They answer No, No to
questions (1) and (2). They agree with the libertarians that determinism rules out genuine moral responsibility, but argue that the falsity of determinism can t help. Accordingly, they conclude that we are not genuinely free agents or genuinely morally responsible, whether determinism is true or false. One of their arguments can be summarized as follows. When one acts, one acts in the way that one does because of the way one is. So to be truly morally responsible for one s actions, one would have to be truly responsible for the way one is: one would have to be causa sui, or the cause of oneself, at least in certain crucial mental respects. But nothing can be causa sui nothing can be the ultimate cause of itself in any respect. So nothing can be truly morally responsible. Suitably developed, this argument against moral responsibility seems very strong. But in many human societies belief in ultimate moral responsibility continues unabated. In many human beings, the experience of choice gives rise to a conviction of absolute responsibility that is untouched by philosophical arguments that put it in question. This conviction is the deep and inexhaustible source of the free will problem: there are powerful arguments that seem to show that we cannot be morally responsible in the ultimate way that we suppose. But these arguments keep coming up against equally powerful psychological and cultural reasons why we continue to believe that we are ultimately morally responsible. ***** While Strawson s article expertly sets out how most philosophers view the free will debate, it is in fact full of fallacies, most especially regarding compatibilism. Strawson writes, Briefly, determinism is the view that the history of the universe is fixed: everything that happens is necessitated by what has already gone before, in such a way that nothing can happen otherwise than it does. This is emphatically not what determinism means. Determinism means that everything that happens is determined by prior causation, i.e. it has a sufficient reason. This does not mean that everything must unfold in a particular, set, fixed way, cast in stone since the Big Bang. To endorse Strawson s claim is already to buy into the scientific materialist understanding of determinism whereby there are no genuinely causal agents in the world, only non-causal objects to which causality simply happens, and over which they have zero control, zero say and zero influence. As soon as you accept the existence of a myriad of uncreated, uncaused causal agents (monads) that are free to determine their actions rather than having them determined for them by causal forces imposed on them from outside, Strawson s definition of determinism is rendered untenable, hence all of his arguments concerning compatibilism fail. What has gone before informs and influences what happens next, but does not determine it, because what s going to happen next depends on decisions taken by inherently free agents acting for their own reasons. We cannot know in advance what these decisions are going to be. Consider your schedule for the rest of today. Is everything you are going to do already set like concrete? Are you simply an actor performing a role already written for you, about which you can change nothing? Or are you going to interact with your environment and decide what to do next on the basis of what happens to you (regarding which you do not yet have any knowledge because nothing has happened yet), and on the basis of your views, reactions and decisions regarding those things? Self-evidently, the
latter is true. You are not a programmed machine and you are not going to behave today like a robot. Nevertheless, no matter what you do, you will certainly have a reason for everything you do. You will not act randomly. You will not do things for no reason. Everything you do will be determined self-determined! According to Strawson s version of determinism (a view shared by most philosophers), you are nothing but a set of atoms subject to scientific laws, and your environment is nothing but a set of atoms subject to scientific laws. Therefore, when you interact with your environment, everything you proceed to do, could, in principle, be calculated in advance by anyone with a sufficient understanding of atoms and the scientific laws that apply to them. There are no self-sufficient causal agents present in this system, nothing that can inject its own causation into the environment using criteria that belong to it and cannot be calculated in advance by anyone else. As soon as you accept the existence of causal agents (i.e. autonomous minds; subjects; eternal souls; monads), Strawson s entire argument becomes unmitigated nonsense that does not reflect reality in any way. What s truly remarkable is that our own behaviour each and every day spectacularly contradicts Strawson s view of determinism, and yet his model of determinism continues to be the one to which most philosopher subscribe. Quite simply, Strawson s claim that everything that happens is necessitated by what has already gone before is entirely wrong. Everything that happens is a reaction and response to what has already gone before. It s not necessitated by it. Our next action is not necessitated by what has just happened to us in terms of atoms moving around, i.e. the atoms in our body, our brain and our environment. Our next action is not determined by atoms at all. It s determined by our mind, and our mind isn t physical and isn t made of atoms! Our mind is an autonomous causal agent that takes its own decisions, regardless of the rest of the world. In fact, our mind must be conceived in the same sort of terms that apply to the Abrahamic God. Does anyone say that God is made of atoms and is causally determined by scientific forces? God is an uncreated, uncaused, eternal causal agent who decides what to do next according to his own decisions and exactly the same is true of all of us. Strawson is in fact talking about physicalist determinism but has unpardonably dropped the physicalist qualifier because he has simply taken it for granted. He has assumed it and then applied it as if it s incontestable. Everything changes as soon as you have a system of physicalist and mentalist determinism, linked by Fourier mathematics, which allows the physical and mental domains to interact, and permits subjective causal agency. Strawson writes, One is therefore wholly free to choose and act even if one s whole physical and psychological makeup is entirely determined by things for which one is in no way ultimately responsible starting with one s genetic inheritance and early upbringing. Here, Strawson applies 1) an ultra-physicalist notion of our behaviour being determined by our genetic inheritance, i.e. by atoms subject to the inescapable laws of science (by nature ), and 2) an ill-defined notion of our early upbringing (i.e. nurture ). Does it even make any sense to refer to nurture if the people bringing us up are genetically determined machines that had no choice about how to raise us up since they were simply carrying out the fixed laws of science? At no stage does Strawson
reflect any notion that we are eternal souls that have a history that, of necessity, precedes our genes and precedes our upbringing. If there s an eternal component to us, then, plainly, it s absurd to claim that the nature and nurture arguments that apply to our current incarnation are the whole of us, i.e. are all that we are. Strawson s argument is destroyed as soon it s conceded that we existed prior to our current physicalization in this world. We therefore have a core character independent of our genes and independent of how we have been raised. Our genes and environment will certainly influence and inform us, but, crucially, they will not determine us, which is the factor that Strawson requires to be true for his argument to be tenable. Again, he has relentlessly applied a physicalist set of arguments and once again ignored mental agency independent of matter and of our current bodily physicalization. Philosophy is full of unstated assumptions. It s full of people reflecting undeclared Meta Paradigms and schemas, all of which simply beg the question. Strawson writes, The incompatibilists hold that freedom is not compatible with determinism. They point out that if determinism is true, then every one of one s actions was determined to happen as it did before one was born. Once again, this reflects a physicalist understanding of reality. Our soul was never born. It s eternal. It didn t have any parents. Nothing caused it and nothing created it. It s influenced and informed by things outside itself, but is not their puppet. It has its own internal agency. It can do things for its own reasons. Strawson writes, So to be truly morally responsible for one s actions, one would have to be truly responsible for the way one is: one would have to be causa sui, or the cause of oneself, at least in certain crucial mental respects. But nothing can be causa sui nothing can be the ultimate cause of itself in any respect. So nothing can be truly morally responsible. Yet again, we have a blatant and invalid physicalist assumption being applied. We are causa sui, in the sense that we are eternal, uncreated and uncaused by anything else just like the Abrahamic God! If we exist but are not caused by anything else then we can say either that we are the cause of ourselves or that we are simply uncaused. Either way, we are responsible for ourselves and can t blame any other cause for the way we are. So, Strawson s article really serves to illustrate how full of unwarranted and unstated assumptions the philosophical debate regarding free will is. It s the assumptions themselves that have to be clarified before any progress can be made in the definitions that erroneously flow from them, thus miring the whole debate in confusion. ***** Do we have free will? It depends what you mean by the word free. More than 200 senses of the word have been distinguished; the history of the discussion of free will is rich and remarkable. David Hume called the problem of free will the most contentious question of metaphysics, the most contentious science. Galen Strawson Remember, it s all in the definition. Make sure you sign up to the correct one! If you don t, you ll turn yourself into a machine or a random behaviour generator. The free will debate isn t so much about free will itself as about definitions of free will, interpretations of free will and speculations about free will. The question of what free will is must be framed within a well-defined ontological and epistemological theory such as that of ontological mathematics.
Self-Causing Either you are caused by another thing or other things or you are not caused by another thing or other things. If the latter, shall we say that you are uncaused or that you are the cause of yourself? Does uncaused = causa sui? In a strictly causal system, everything caused must have a first cause, but what of the first cause itself? Nothing caused it. Hence, it is uncaused or its own cause, depending on how we wish to define it. In a causal system, if you are not caused by anything else, you are your own cause, i.e. your essence ensures your existence. Your essence is eternal and so is your existence. Your essence necessitates your existence and does so forever. We might say that your essence is the cause of your existence. This argument applies solely to monads. Nothing else qualifies. In Abrahamism, such an argument would be applied to a single Creator God. In ontological mathematics, it s applied to myriad monads. All of them are thus would-be Gods.
The Turing Test The phrase The Turing Test is most properly used to refer to a proposal made by Turing (1950) as a way of dealing with the question whether machines can think. According to Turing, the question whether machines can think is itself too meaningless to deserve discussion. However, if we consider the more precise and somehow related question whether a digital computer can do well in a certain kind of game that Turing describes ( The Imitation Game ), then at least in Turing s eyes we do have a question that admits of precise discussion. Moreover, as we shall see, Turing himself thought that it would not be too long before we did have digital computers that could do well in the Imitation Game. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Mathematician Alan Turing envisaged a sophisticated computer that could be programmed to generate responses that would be indistinguishable from those of a human (or convincing enough to fool a human). A huge amount of deterministic thinking is predicated on humans being essentially nothing but Turing machines, programmed by nature rather than by a designer. In fact, Turing s test is ludicrous. No machine could ever be invented to simulate a human. Why not? Because humans are controlled by eternal monadic souls, and this necessary condition could never apply to any machine. To support Turing s contention is already to have assumed a physicalist understanding of reality. ***** According to the physicalists, programmed biological machines (humans) can program mechanical machines. Indeed, it s inevitable that they will do so since, from the dawn of time, it was deterministically decreed that this would happen. No programmer has any choice since each programmer was in turn programmed. In the physicalist worldview, there s no fundamental reason why programmed biological machines made of atoms and obeying the laws of science should be distinguishable from programmed mechanical machines made of atoms and obeying the laws of science. However, there s all the difference in the world in the mentalist worldview. Humans have souls and machines don t. It s a category error to claim that the Turing test could ever be valid. ***** Deep Blue, IBM s chess-playing computer, defeated World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov in a famous match in 1997. Did this computer pass the Turing test, at least as far as chess is concerned? Clearly, it did since it beat the greatest human chess player of all time. Yet would anyone consider Deep Blue in any way human and in any way conscious? Even if you produced a perfect Deep Blue for every aspect of human existence, it still wouldn t be human, and still wouldn t be conscious. It would remain exactly what it is: a programmed machine, a simulation of a human, a simulacrum. It has no soul (no eternal monadic essence), and no one can program a soul something eternal into a temporal machine. In nature, souls take possession of biological bodies via a
Fourier docking process that accompanies conception. The only way to get a machine to become alive would be to set it up so that a soul could likewise dock with it. If a programmer could set up a sufficiently rich and complex AI environment, they could conceivably lure a soul into it, but they could never program a living soul into it. The Turing test is simply a test of the quality of an AI simulation of a human. It doesn t establish any equivalence between human thinking and machine thinking. It simply demonstrates that, in certain situations, machines can be effective imitators of humans. That doesn t make them human any more than a parrot is human when it repeats what someone said. Imitation/simulation isn t correspondence. Science itself is a kind of reality Turing test. Scientific theories, in specific situations, successfully imitate reality to a good approximation. Scientists then fallaciously conclude that their theories are authentic statements about reality. They re not. They re never anything more than synthetic attempts to describe analytic reality. The sole reason they work is that they use mathematics, the language of analytic reality. The Compatibilism Fallacy? As its name declares, [compatibilism] is compatible with determinism. It is compatible with determinism even though it follows from determinism that every aspect of your character, and everything you will ever do, was already inevitable before you were born. Galen Strawson Wrong! Determinism means that every effect has a cause; everything is determined, everything has a sufficient reason. It does not mean that these reasons existed before you were born, which is to make an absolutely extraordinary claim, rendering life 100% pointless, meaningless and incomprehensible, in no way reactive to the events of the world, and wholly devoid of any genuine evolution (Darwinian evolution involves natural selection, but nothing is selected if every selection was fully determined at the Big Bang before anything was even available to be selected!). Strawson s definition of determinism is fallacious, which automatically leads to his understanding of compatibilism being fallacious. Of course, he is by no means alone virtually the entire philosophical community argues in like fashion. ***** Suppose tomorrow is a national holiday. You are considering what to do. You can climb a mountain or read Lao Tzu. You can mend your bicycle or go to the zoo. At this moment, you are reading the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. You are free to go on reading or stop now. You have started on this sentence, but you don t have to... finish it. In this situation, as so often in life, you have a number of options. Nothing forces your hand. It seems natural to say that you are entirely free to choose what to do. And, given that nothing hinders you, it seems natural to say that you act entirely freely when you actually do (or try to do) what you have decided to do.... What more could free agency possibly be?, compatibilists like to ask (backed by Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, among others). And this is a very powerful question. Galen Strawson Exactly. If free agency isn t free will, what on earth is it?
Monadic Freedom Only monads exist. There are two types of monadic causation: intra-monadic and inter-monadic: 1) Intra-monadic causation corresponds to subjective, self-generated behaviour. This is internal determinism. When the individual is the cause of his own actions, he acts freely. This is free determinism, meaning that the monadic subject freely determines what it does. 2) Inter-monadic causation corresponds to objective, other-generated behaviour. This is external determinism. When the individual is not the cause of his actions, he does not act freely. This is constrained determinism. Compatibilism in Illuminism is the position that free will (= free determinism; internal determinism) is absolutely compatible with constrained will (= constrained determinism; external determinism), i.e. the existence of constrained determinism in no way precludes free determinism, but free determinism constitutes a different character of determinism from constrained determinism, being subjective rather than objective, yet equally mathematical. Incompatibilism is the fallacy that determinism and free will fundamentally contradict each other. One strain of incompatibilism is hard determinism. This is the fallacy that only constrained determinism exists, hence free will is impossible. This is the scientific materialist view. The opposite strain of incompatibilism is metaphysical libertarianism. This is the fallacy that free will exists, but has nothing to do with determinism, and indeed there is no determinism at all. This is an uncompromisingly indeterministic stance. Hard incompatibilism is the fallacy that determinism (which may or may not be true in this view) and indeterminism (which may or may not be true) are both incompatible with free will. Either way, free will is false. All of these incompatibilist positions are fallacies that fail to understand what free will actually is. Free will is causal agency by entities that are uncaused causes. Free will cannot be associated with any agent that is created, caused, contingent or temporal (i.e. in time, hence not eternal). The human body, for example, is all of these: created, caused, contingent and temporal. The human body itself can never be free. It belongs to the domain of constrained determinism. However, it has to be understood that it s subject to two radically different types of constraint: internal and external, subjective and objective, mental and physical. Its actions are determined from the inside by the mind and from the outside by the physical environment. It s precisely because of this that internal and external, subjective and objective determinism, must be compatible because otherwise the human body would be a mad, incomprehensible thing, beset by two contradictory and incompatible forces. When they attempt to understand the human body, scientists invariably approach the question entirely from the empiricist, materialist Meta Paradigm of science. This means that they conceive of the body being made exclusively of material atoms, each of which is part of the external, objective determinism schema alone. They imagine the mind as being something that is produced solely from the brain, with the brain, like the rest of the body, being made of atoms and nothing else. In these terms, hard determinism is the only rational conclusion. There s no compatibilism issue here because no other type
of determinism is possible in this model. What so many people fail to understand is that scientific materialism is just a philosophy, stating a philosophical position. It s not a set of incontestable facts and truths. It s an interpretation of evidence, not an explanation of that evidence. Compatibilism becomes a necessary position as soon as it s concluded that scientific materialism is radically false in its ideology that bodies are all about atoms and nothing else. In ontological mathematics, there s a whole category of existence denied by science, namely, that of immaterial, dimensionless Fourier frequency domains outside space and time: monadic singularities. These are mental, not physical, atoms, and they do not operate in the same domain. They are, however, fully compatible with physical atoms since they obey exactly the same mathematics: Fourier mathematics. The critical difference is that Fourier mathematics is defined with regard to two distinct domains a dimensionless frequency domain and a dimensional spacetime domain. Both of these domains are mathematically compatible but they are absolutely different in the sense that an entity must be in one domain or the other, and can t be in both. So, a monad, a mental atom, is always in the frequency domain outside space and time, while a physical atom is always in the spacetime domain. A human body is entirely in the spacetime domain, surrounded by other spacetime entities that can deterministically interact with it. However, the body is also linked to a monad (a soul), which is not in the spacetime domain at all but in the frequency domain outside space and time. The human body is therefore subject to two deterministic sources: 1) its spacetime environment, and 2) the frequency environment, outside space and time, via its controlling monad (an immaterial singularity). The spacetime domain is the product of all monads the Monadic Collective hence all entities within it are collective, not individual. A soul is an individual entity that links to a collective body. We can understand the whole of reality in terms of monads operating individually or collectively. When they operate collectively, they generate the objective spacetime world of matter that we live in. When they operate individually, they constitute the individual souls that can link to collective bodies in the spacetime environment. The following scheme applies in terms of determinism: 1) Collective/collective determinism = scientific, objective determinism; spacetime objects interact with each other. 2) Collective/individual determinism = spacetime objects (bodies) transmit information to individual souls via Fourier transform functions that convert spacetime representations into frequency representations. All sensory information that we experience results from the spacetime information impinging on our bodies being mathematically transformed into frequency representations (which are, of course, mental, not physical, representations). All secondary properties colours, smells, tastes, and so on, are added at this stage, i.e. they are subjective interpretations of objective spacetime functions. 3) Individual/collective determinism = a soul transmits information to the physical body it controls via inverse Fourier transforms (= the human will). We can think of an action without actually making it happen (the action exists only in our mind). It happens for real only when we will it to happen, which means specifically sending a
Fourier command to our body. 4) Individual/individual determinism = a soul having one thought after another, each thought causing the next. This all happens in the frequency domain, outside space and time. A dream takes place in the frequency domain, outside space, time and matter, hence why it does not obey the same rules of causal objectivity as the waking world. In our dreams, we are subject to our own will alone. In the waking world, we are subject to the objective will of the whole Monadic Collective, which provides the resistance we all encounter in our day-to-day lives. It must be understood that the scheme we have outlined is the only possible way to explain the human condition and our experience of manifesting free will, experiencing qualia, and having dreams. It s impossible to understand the human condition in terms of scientific materialism. If that ideology were correct, we would be unfree machines, we would never experience qualia and we would never dream. We have shown exactly why the doctrine of compatibilism is necessary: to explain how our body can be affected by things happening to it in the external, spacetime environment (objective, scientific determinism) and be affected by things happening to it in the internal, frequency domain of the soul, which can then transmit Fourier commands to the body to make things happen in the physical world (e.g. we decide to go for a walk and thus we will our body to commence walking in the spacetime world). Our body is determined by things coming from outside it and things coming from inside it. We thus have a deterministic competition going on, and the strongest determinism at any one time wins. If we want to go for a walk and there is nothing in the physical environment to provide a sufficient resistance, then we will go ahead and do so. However, if we are chained to a wall, or trying to walk into a hurricane, then the physical environment will win and thwart our will. We will not be having our walk after all. External and internal determinism are compatible in the sense that they can mathematically co-exist without any rational contradiction, but they can also be incompatible in the sense that they may be in direct competition with each other, and one or the other must prove victorious. Normally, we can control our environment and exercise our free will, but we cannot do so when Nature flexes its muscles. We are all helpless if caught up in an earthquake, tsunami, forest fire, hurricane, volcano, tornado, car accident, terrorist bomb, flu epidemic, freezing weather, or whatever. In such circumstances, we are the victims of the external world and our inner will is overwhelmed. However, whenever our environment is benign, we can do exactly as we will. The very fact that deterministic competition takes place between external and internal factors shows that the future cannot be predicted, and we are in a radically free world. No one can ever know the future, and that includes God, because the future is dictated by feedback loops between the internal and external, and the effects of these cannot be known in advance. The scheme we have outlined provides, effectively, rational proof that you have an immortal, indestructible soul since this is the only possible way in which free will, qualia, the unconscious, consciousness, dreams and subjectivity can all be explained. This, it cannot be stressed enough, is a purely mathematical explanation, based on Fourier mathematics and the God Equation, and nothing else. It has no woo woo elements and no connection with faith. It requires no God, no Creator, no cosmic Master, no heaven and
no hell. The unconscious, consciousness, free will, qualia, dreams and subjectivity are the rocks on which scientific materialism catastrophically founders. It cannot explain any of these. It can t even formulate a meaningful way to discuss them. It can t define what they are and equally can t define what they are not. No part of its Meta Paradigm can accommodate them. It simply talks of them miraculously emerging from things in which they have no conceivable rational ground. Mind cannot come from non-mind (matter), life cannot come from non-life, free will cannot come from scientific determinism, subjectivity cannot come from objectivity, the unconscious and consciousness can t come from non-conscious things, and dreams cannot be produced by atomic and molecular entities that don t and can t dream. Dreaming is a core activity of mind. We dream all the time. In fact, we do nothing but dream. When we go to sleep, we largely suppress all sensory input from the objective, external world. Our mind is then free to explore the subjective frequency domain rather than the objective spacetime domain. Most of our dreaming occurs unconsciously, so we have no chance of consciously experiencing it and hence of remembering it. REM sleep is where our consciousness interacts with the unconscious mind: our consciousness watches material being projected at us from the unconscious mind rather than from the external world. Because our consciousness is engaged, we have some chance of remembering these dreams. No part of dreaming makes any senses in terms of the human body being made from nothing but the mindless, lifeless, material, non-conscious, non-dreaming atoms of scientific materialism. ***** It s impossible for free will not to be deterministic. Free will cannot be random, acausal or indeterministic. All actions must have a sufficient reason. If a freely chosen action had no reason for, it would not be free but an insane, random action, and no one who behaved without sufficient reasons could function in any human manner. They would instead be random behaviour generators. The compatibilist position is that there are two types of determinism: internal and external, subjective and objective. The incompatibilist position denies that there are two types of determinism. Hard determinism asserts that only external, objective determinism is possible and there s no such thing as internal, subjective determinism. (The latter can be true only if autonomous, immaterial minds exist outside space and time, and these are precisely what are denied by scientific determinism). Libertarianism denies that there is any determinism at all (while completing failing to explain what free will actually is and what mechanism it operates by). Hard incompatibilism asserts that either there is only external, objective determinism or pure indeterminism (i.e. libertarianism, which is scientifically unexplained and inexplicable), and neither is compatible with free will. What is free will? To act according to free will requires the ability to: a) defer action in order to generate alternative courses of action (i.e. to resist a single, automatic or instinctual course of action), b) generate multiple possible courses of action (i.e. to conceive of multiple different futures), c) evaluate, using various criteria, the likely consequences of each potential course of action (i.e. to perform a cost-benefit analysis, not according to any absolute standards but according to a person s own feelings,
opinions, standards, beliefs, tastes, interpretations, conjectures, hypotheses, character, and personality, i.e. subjective rather than objective criteria, unique to each person), d) remember similar situations from the past and learn from them, e) act teleologically (i.e. have aims, goals, purposes, targets, desired futures that draw a person towards them), f) calculate, according to the person s own standards, how to achieve their ends, g) have at least some element or glimmer of consciousness and not act through programmed instinct alone, h) problem-solve. In short, your free will involves the ability to stop, to imagine two or more possible futures depending on what actions you might take, evaluate these possible futures using your own subjective criteria, and plan how to make your desired, teleological future happen. To make this happen rather than that. A crucial aspect of free will is that it must generate alternative courses of action that are more or less equally possible and realistic, For example, someone with free will can easily change his mind, and decide to reject a course of action that he had preciously imagined was the best. Imagine that you were choosing between going on holiday to Italy or France. Today, you might settle on Italy. Tomorrow, you decide that France would be better. Or you might have your hand hovering chocolate bar A and chocolate bar B. You initially reach for A then change your mind and take B. Philosophical illiterates and ignoramuses often make the bizarre claim that all choices available to free will and generated by free will are actually illusory and that all along there was only one thing you were ever going to do (i.e. you were driven inexorably by scientific determinism and could never have acted differently from how you did act). How and why does scientific materialism make people with illusory free will defer action, generate meaningless alternative courses of action when one course is inevitable (and is being pointlessly delayed for some unknown and inexplicable reason), and even change their mind, or admit afterwards that they made a mistake and should have chosen one of the other options. To have free will means to be capable of exhibiting free determinism (acting for your own reasons), not free indeterminism (acting randomly, for no reason). You must have an open-ended future available to you, have the ability to deterministically assess various potential courses of action available to you, each of which will result in a different future, whose costs and benefits are able to be determined by you using your subjective criteria, and then finally determine which, in your opinion, is the best course of action available to you, which is the one you then actually carry out. Having free will means having the ability to deterministically evaluate several possible futures open to you, depending on which of several courses of action you choose, and then deterministically going ahead and choosing one of those courses of action. You always have a sufficient reason for what you decide to do, i.e. your course of action is fully determined and not in any way random, acausal, accidental, indeterministic, contrary to your own reason and nature, or absolutely inevitable because of a prior causal chain entirely external to you, which you are compelled to obey (as science claims). So, free will comes down to the difference between automatic external, objective determinism (scientific determinism), in which you have no choice at all about what comes next, and non-automatic, internal, subjective determinism in which a subject can deterministically weigh up alternative courses of action rather than being constrained to
follow one, inevitable course of action. Free will is all about determinism, but of a singular nature subjective determinism. Only subjective determinism can involve choice. Only subjective determinism can be free of constraint. If someone holds a gun to your head and orders you to do something or he will shoot you, you still have a choice, but it s now a massively constrained choice because of external factors. Your free will can certainly be affected and influenced by external factors, but is not determined by them. All discussions of free will in the current academic environment have failed to distinguish between non-automatic, subjective, internal determinism and automatic, objective, external determinism. Plainly, the debate about free will is radically different if subjective determinism is denied. You then have no choice but to accept external determinism (which makes free will impossible), or internal indeterminism (which makes free will about randomness). Materialism is all about external determinism being the sole reality. i.e. you are a material being acted upon by inevitable and inexorable material, mechanical forces that allow no scope whatsoever for alternative courses of action. Most materialists are hard determinists, although some will prefer to call themselves hard incompatibilists, whereby they deny that meaningful free will can coexist with indeterminism, never mind determinism. People who despise the very notion of free will, mind and subjectivity are hard incompatibilists. They are extremist materialists who want to remove any mention or possibility of free will from consideration. Metaphysical libertarianism is a position often attributed to extremist idealists. Here, physical determinism is denied and all actions are said to flow from undetermined mental choices (free will), although it s never clear in this scheme how a choice can be made without a determination. Compatibilism is the position that 1) subjective and objective, 2) internal and external, 3) automatic and non-automatic, types of determinism can, do and must coexist. It s absurd to deny subjective, internal determinism (free will), as the hard determinists and hard incompatibilists do. It s absurd to deny objective, external determinism, and subjective, internal determinism, as the metaphysical libertarians do. The only logical, rational position is compatibilism. Compatibilism is the simple position that the world comprises internal and external causality, which have a different character, the latter being automatic and inflexible, the former non-automatic and flexible, driven by internal reasons (causes) rather than external reasons (causes). Compatibilism does not comprise external causality alone, or internal causality alone, and it explicitly rules out the possibility that the world is fundamentally indeterministic as quantum science claims. Anyone who opposes compatibilism doesn t know what they re talking about. They haven t understood the nature of free will at all. Free will, to repeat, is subjective determinism and involves subjectively determining a set of multiple potential courses of action, and then determining which of these is the best for you (in your own subjective opinion). Non-free will is objective determinism and involves an action being forced on you by external factors over which you have no control. You cannot, for example, defy a hurricane. Schopenhauer said, Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills. This is a crucial point. You are ultimately determined by your will and you cannot will to
have a different will (because then you would become a different person making different choices and behaving entirely differently, and there is any in case no mechanism for becoming a person who wills according to different wills: you are your will and what you will). All realistic potential courses of action a free agent generates are consistent with his will. He can certainly intellectually conceive of other courses of action inconsistent with his will, but these would never be chosen because he would never will them. For example, you might imagine running into your office stark naked, but you never actually will. What a willing being wishes to do is will the best outcome, as he imagines it, for himself. He wants to maximise his power, hence is exercising his Will to Power, as Nietzsche proposed. However, the option that maximises your power is not self-evident, hence requires analysis deterministic analysis, based on your own understanding of the world. It certainly does not require choosing randomly. Free will has no connection with willing any old thing at all, for no reason. That s not free will; that s madness. Free means being free to choose between several options that you have freely generated. It does not mean being free to do anything at all, contrary to your reason, your personality, your nature, your character, and your will. You wouldn t be you if you were free in that sense. You are free to determine your future. You are not free not to. You are a deterministic, not indeterministic being. Your determinism comes from inside, not outside, and totally reflects you. Why are we all rather regular in our habits? Because our behaviour is patterned, not random. It s characteristic of us, not of anyone else. What is it that the enemies of free will and compatibilism despise so much? It s the notion that causality can come from within as well as from without. Internal causality means that subjects exist, minds exist, teleology exists and meaning exists. The Materialist Fundamentalists such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris cannot abide any idea that the universe is quintessentially full of meaning. Meaning is, above all, what all atheistic scientists loathe. All of them, without exception, describe the universe as meaningless and purposeless, an accidental machine that randomly sprang out of nothing for no reason. As soon as free will is admitted, scientific materialism falls apart, which is why science is so opposed to free will and compatibilism. People like Sam Harris have made a lucrative career out of their Fundamentalist Materialism. They re not suddenly going to see the light. Illuminism is all about monads. Monads are mathematical minds that generate their own causal chains. However, they are also influenced (but not determined) by the causal chains generated by other individual monads and by the causal chain generated by all monads together (the Monadic Collective), this latter chain being the objective, causal chain of scientific materialism. We are influenced but not determined by the causality of other individual monads unless they kill us, in which case they have determined our current status. We are influenced but not necessarily, and we are not usually determined, by the causal chain of the Monadic Collective. If it rains, we can choose to go indoors, put on a hat or raise an umbrella. But if we are caught in a hurricane, we are helpless in the face of this overwhelming external causality. We are all initiators of causality but we are also informed, influenced and sometimes determined by the causal chains produced by other individual monads, or by