Re: Free-will, interdependence

["Dan Fiscus" <***>]

James and all,

A few comments re: this thread...

James N Rose wrote:
>>>Is it reasonable, reliable, or even valid, to go the Liar's
>>>Paradox one-better, and enunciate:
>>>
>>>Can a fixed deterministic rule (presumed to preface and
>>>frame the existence of this or any possible universe)
>>>specify the existence of perfect open indeterminancy?

> The meme 'free will' is an alluring one.  It has a mystic that is right up there
> with the sex urge.  Humans in fact raise it to the status of almost supreme
> importance for our life and behaving, as if to not have it makes us no
> better than rock and dirt.  That's pretty amazing.  Subliminally, we've even
> demarcated the rest of the animal world to 'that other side' by casting
> their behaviors as 'instinctive', as if it were some animated category
> of no-free-will rocklike-ness.
>
> So I had to wonder, that very long ago, ... why?  What's the grip that
> sense and perception has on us?, and, where does it stem from?, and,
> what would it mean, what would our behaviors be like if it weren't
> 'important' to us?
>
> Long story short, I see us existing in a universe that 'makes sense', there's
> a reason for everything.  Even 'emergence' has a lineage.  And so must
> the percept and meme of 'free will'.  Even in unbounded domains.

A catch-22 I see in ecology (theoretical, applied, ecosystems) is
that independence (free-ness) is achieved through interdependence.
No organism is self-sufficient or self-sustaining or self-causing, but
ecosystemic teams of autotrophic and heterotrophic organisms and
the closed loops of energy and matter and info flow they embody
and co-create can self-sustain and self-cause to a large degree
(still need energy and matter, at least so far as life has evolved).

Another crux comes when you try to link free will to self-building.
Like life is free to do everything except cut the old umbilical cord
before the new lifeline is safely established. There is a kind of
blind spot that must be covered, again by at least two models,
views or agents acting in cooperation, each seeing and covering
the other's blind spot. This can come into play in generalizing the
Turing Test for intelligence - the lifeline to physical substrate is
more fundamental that higher order functions like cognition. If
I can walk up to a computer and pull its plug, it is obviously not
as intelligent as a human, in the extended sense of intelligence as
"knowing how to live".

Interesting issues ya'll raise...

Dan

--

Dan Fiscus
Ecologist/Research Assistant
University of Maryland
Center for Environmental Science
Appalachian Lab
301 Braddock Rd
Frostburg, MD 21532
301-689-7121 (phone)
http://al.umces.edu/~fiscus/research