Re: Free-will

["Tim Gwinn" <***>]

> -----Original Message-----
> [JJK]
> Hi Tim and others;
>
> I think this is exactly to the point. Once the causalities are looped
> and simultaneous, there is no sequence in modeling, it happens
> instantaneously. What would that be like experientially? In that case,
> any non-commutation between model and system must appear compressed into
> the moment of experience and would necessarily appear as the ability to
> resolve the mis-match (or keep imagining resolutions). The mismatch
> produces uncertainties or multiple possibilities of a system realizing a
> function or a function describing a system. That's about as close to
> free-will as any description of it can get, I think.
>

Nicely said. I would quibble about "uncertainties", though. I doubt that
causal entailments would produce uncertainties in loops any more than they
would in a linear chain.

[Wandering thoughts follow:]
I have to keep reminding myself that even the anticipatory models Rosen
describes in AS are just models, and that the clean diagrammatic separation
in the pictures between internal model, effectors and so on, is only an
abstraction. In its material realization, I think an anticipatory system is
much less distinctly differentiated (in a biological sense), so one could
not easily point to the model portion, the effector portion, and so on, in
much the same way that metabolism is not a process one could readily
partition physically from the rest of the organism. And that it is probably
therefore unwise to conceptually analogize the internal model as a piece of
software upon which the hardware around it operates, since such an analogy
can lead us to think of such a system as having a few or some finite number
of choices. Rosen says near the end of Essays:
"On the other hand, in a complex system, there is no meaningful distinction
between hardware and software, no single over-arching function that stays
fixed while only its arguments can vary. In material  terms, a system of
this type is literally infinitely open, whereas a mechanism or simple system
can be, at best, finitely open." [EL337-338]

If so, being "literally infinitely open" may mean there is no inherent limit
on the range of possible responses. But on the other hand, how such a system
goes from an infinite number of possibilities to one specific response is
unclear to me. I have not yet found where Rosen comments further
specifically on the consequences of "infinitely open" in this regard.
Perhaps it is unclear to me because the notion of 'response' is of a
mechanistic heritage, and the whole scheme of input followed by response is
just a poor abstraction. I don't know at the moment.

Regards,
Tim