Ha ha, you haven't spoiled a thing by telling me Neo's revelation. It would only have spoiled it if I haven't had the inclination to think so myself! You've increased anticipation! Thank you.
I love the matrix movies. I saw so much philosophy when I watch it. Basically every sentence uttered has specific meaningful regard to something important to the implied psychological impact of such an imagined reality on presumably free willed beings.
I've written another piece, which is shorter, more succinct, more philosophical in outlook, and something I find much more satisfying.
As with the other treatise, I reccommend transforming this paper into a wordprocessed document. I hope somebody out there, more than just I guess you surely will, who will finds some interest or value in it. Please enjoy, a new net friend, Justin.
Please, I urge you to print this out and give or email it to anyone you know who might be interested, be it friends, philosophy professors, the local unconventional priest, or anyone who might be interested. If you do this, please attach my email address nednednerb@hotmail.com so if they are sufficiently interested or outraged, I may find either way some contstructive criticism.
These ideas are more than just fun for me. I want to participate very actively in global scientific, philosophical, ethical, and environmental debate in my life. As I don't have a matrix to impede my plans to share with the world my realizations, I choose to augment the emerging networks of expanding human consciousness such as how Matrix has changed those who watched it and were impacted by it profoundly, such as you and I, it would appear.
I'm curious, how do conceive to be the nature of free will?
Brenden
A mind apart from body.
Introduction
Each cell is alive. Each organism is alive, and each human is alive. I think we can all agree being alive constitutes being responsive and adaptive to one's environment. I tend to imagine this requires some kind of free awareness of volition at every level of life.
I tend to believe an individual is a unified, independent consciousness.
Each of your cells contributes to the whole cellular celebration, you who are beyond them in some managerial way, at least from your perspective.
We don't normally string words together that: Every one of your cells contributes to your unity of consciousness. How did this occur in the original emergence of multicellular life forms, that a bunch of independent individual cells, each with a little piece of consciousness, somehow managed to coordinate their cooperative physical intent and volitions to permit survival of their life to the radical extent that one mind could emerge? (Let it be clearly said that I see, feel, think, and believe this was definitely an evolutionary advantage. )
This has been part of my mindset and one of the questions during the previous four years of my life. I think I do stumble upon some answers, slowly.
What if, against my own inclination, some that I was hearing about ourselves was true, namely that we are actually automaton-like in that our cellular interactions provide the illusion of a unity of consciousness, or that free will is an ultimate illusion, and consciousness is just, from our perspective, a self-perceiving oddity of physical nature (!), a mere consequent of the genetic and phenotypic biochemical reactivity of single-celled life and beyond to us. In both these views, my ideas can progress nowhere. You may need to bend your mind for what is to follow, if you come to understand what I propose. I feel it's basic enough.
We are free. We are spirits. We are the vital attractors of inanimate matter into life, and even in a most beautiful way to say, that we, thru love, willingly take inanimate matter to be a home for our deepest inner sources to enliven it into a child of it own willing ‘divine.’
Sounds nice, doesn't it? Could it be that this isn't just poetic delusion with respect to the actual scientific, empirical, and immutable nature of reality, a physical reality known only to behave randomly with no room for a divine connection of a ‘floaty’ spirit who guides the body?
Couldn’t these spiritual conceptions instead of some crazy totalitarian or ignorant God merely represent the best available model from which to view the conscious involvements abounding, you and I, and our relationship with the physical reality. I do not contend by means of genuine spirit that the physical models we have are inadequate or inferior. I love quantum brane theory and ethic-political symbiology. (Terms I joyfully imagine now, that I would feel rest for our future, near and far.)
A real soul
I tend to imagine that ‘the activity of the soul’ is a realistic and accurate description of life's place in the physical universe. I tend to conceive of spirituality in terms logically distinct from conventional religious overtones, even while my conception of a spirit, and of each consciousness that it consists of, is subtly expressed by metaphor in nonscientific Christian mythology and very often explicitly in the Eastern-based and self-purportedly 'scientific' spiritualities such as Tibetan Buddhism and various forms of yoga. I have found a way to reach a similar conclusion as these disciplines have permitted, while of a more genuinely scientific basis. I think, anyway.
It should be said; by spirit I mean force of life. Free will found in spirit guides the body; creating what we call life. I define spirit to be a living union of transforming dead pointless physical energy into a structure capable (thru the dynamics of a cell) of relaying and receiving information to and from you, the life-form, the consciousness, behind the simple random matter, giving it your choice. I believe this and my ideas proceed seeking a justification for an edifice of my subjective reality. I believe there is room in reality for free consciousness, and I don’t think it can be found simply in form of a physical manifestation of a brain, for example.
Then what is consciousness?
A central hypothesis of mine is that consciousness represents a distinct aspect, like any other real part of this, of nature, because it is an integral function of the immutable logic of absolutely underlying reality.
What does that mean? I just did completely articulate the ultimate assumption from which
Science has propelled the physical aspect of reality far above the Gods. I mean that consciousness is an aspect of nature like physical reality. I tend to like this approach to solving the questions of what's happening to us, and more pertinently, what is happening because of us. I don't agree that God created reality. I think rather that the integral functions of immutable reality created God, if at all, and for sure everything else that is actually real.
The basic idea of my contribution fully flourished while reading James Gardner's book, Biocosm. I continued to develop a thought that if, as he proposed, "intelligent life is the architect of the universe" and not the other way around, then the nature of consciousness must be special in some way. Is this not a valid direction in which to carry on? Why are some so reverent to the notion that the observed free will of life is an anomaly in an unthinking pointless randomness of vast impersonality that we call the cosmos?
Is it plausible to think the universe has personality or is this dangerously theological thinking?
Like radical Gaia theory may entail if you are thus imaginatively inclined, the universe is personal and we are that manifestation of personality. Reality is not distinct from us. It’s logically ludicrous to imagine that the cosmos is unfeeling! Don’t we have feeling? This is not a fallacy of equivocation. This is a concept that because the universe is energy, and because we are animated bodies of energy, we partially are and wholly are in the universe, and our results are the finite results of the universe. We don’t normally string words together that the universe decided to form a technological culture on Earth, but that is my contention.
We all have irreducibly real value as beings. We project consciousness based of the information in reality, into other parts of reality. We are each a personality of reality. The universe is not ultimately lifeless and impersonal. It-We is ultimately vital. We may experience different things in different ways, but we both do so like that. That tree has meaning too, its meaning my ability to breathe and think this thru to you. This is not only a freak circumstance of immutable physical laws of no vitality. Energy in conspiring and we’re loving it! We are each a bit of the mind of the Earth.
Rather than a wild chance: life is the synthesis of immutable consciousness AND immutable physical law. We come across no other way than consciously, by means of an entirely physical body as real and profound as well described by modern science. My ideas do not assert that the laws of physics apply in no real way, or another way put that the physical world is made subservient or inferior to a hokey-pokey magic land where a God imagined the fate of all. My ideas do not assert that a mind created reality. NO!
My idea is that reality is the only thing that need never ever be created! This is the assumptive foundation, followed by the assumption that my apparent free will actually is genuine. Then I had at task to coalesce by imaginative means how these two assumptions would corroborate with the immutable structure of physical reality known to us in physics, chemistry, and more so these days, biochemistry. My goal was to produce a physical-esque model for consciousness, and my motives for this you will discover if you pursue my writing.
Where did I go with this foundation?
Slowly, the human intellect is engraining into its own culture an edifice by which to offer a better way for following generations. (I believe genetic, and memetic, evolution is progress.) The edifice is of the nature that it insists we cannot deny the invariability of reality. The assumption for method for conducting good one’s reason, the scientific method, according as Descartes described. My contribution to this edifice is that, ultimately adding just a bit more to the already emerging converging beauty of life, consciousness is uniquely of its own logic. What does that even mean, some might say? But then how could these same people also purport to say something definite is meant when we say these real things come from undeniably physical laws and nature who work themselves out by means of strict while uncertain mathematical relationship, hypothetically necessary? One of my central philosophical goals is to persuade humanity that they are real and don’t need God, because that may ward off our nihilistic bent developed mainly in the time that religion has crumbled for many in the advent of science.
In Brains possess curiously branelike parameters and HOW they do stuff!, in an admittedly bizarre and confusing smattering of four-word adjective use, I set out the result I came to, asking these questions and deciding these assumptions. I hope this essay you now read offers some clarity from which that paper's complex ideas have emerged.
I didn't intend to mean anything arcane and complicated, but I am forever reminded, again and again so much I've decided I like to believe my mother, that often my ideas come across a little high for most people to keep up, but nonetheless she kept noticing and motivating in her grand ability as a poetic wordsmith, that sometimes, I make a little sense too! I hope I have to you, here, with this. I also thank my day for his ability to readily notice flaws in my argument even when we couldn’t come to terms. I was very more radical and confused until coming to terms with my perception and developing these writings. Now I feel I have succeeded; preliminarily, as such.