Sunday, 27th September 2015, 07:56 by Aule
I've had the privilege and pain of having been psychologically unmade more than once in my life. If you have never experienced this for yourself, there is nothing that can prepare you for it, but suffice it to say that the you whom you believe is you is not really a fixed you, but merely an avatar of you created by structures and alignments of the neural chemistry within you. The proof of this as an objective fact is visible upon examination of the resulting changes in personality and cognition that can occur by the rearrangement of brain function, whether by surgery, trauma, destruction, disease, rejuvenation, or repair. The very idea of self is malleable, so any discussion of self-directed will can only be based upon the simplified renderings of an idealized self.
I perceive myself today to be an observer of the changing states of my own mind, and objectively I know that what I know is not even a measurable fraction of what could be known, even within the narrow confines of an ideal self. One cannot even be sure what one knows, because things can be (and are) made known without awareness every day, such as when the eye-brain interface registers a thing into thought without having a conscious pathway of choice. This subliminal kind of event is unavoidable, given how deeply our senses are wired in us. Even if you try to measure and gauge every input, you cannot do so.
We do have choice, insofar as deciding what to think about what we think, perhaps, but as to how we think, well, that's another story altogether.
Do you know why you must sleep, and dream? Not really, because nobody does, really. This thing we all must do, which paralyzes us for fully 1/3 of our entire existence, is a nearly complete mystery to us. Put your ideas about free will to sleep.
You also, lest you die, must eat and therefore defecate what your body doesn't use. Sitting there in the miasma our own bodies produce, we are just as every other eating creature and no more highly evolved than them in that moment. Free will your ass.
Also, modern research shows that the human body itself is not at all the monolithic thing we once thought, but is in some sense a symbiotic colony of varying genetic origins and purposes. In actual fact, if you count it up just by the number of cells, not mass, you are only made up of 5% of your own DNA. Yes, five percent. The rest is other living things living along with you. So free will your microbiome, too.
What if living being itself is another physical dimension of the universe, like time, and itself greatly expands the number of possible states within the universe? Then, because living beings rarely (ever?) exist independently from others, the collisions of semi-autonomous beings that arise in chaos tend to self-organize into more complex systems, adding yet another dimension to being, that of social interaction. A line of existence becomes a plane, so to speak, and the varying numbers, quantities and types of three-dimensional beings existing through time as interacting pathways of influence greatly expands again the total number of possible states of the universe. So we are now living in six dimensions, and no closer to a fuller accounting of our place in it, but more remote from prediction and valid assessment than any simple weather system by orders of magnitude.
The ultimate truth just gets farther away the more deeply you probe and the more information you acquire. But it's still fun to try. Just remember that you can only choose what to think about what it is you think, and you'll be fine. And don't forget to eat and sleep. Those are important. Oh, and flushing immediately really helps to minimize the miasma, if it bothers you. There's some free will for you.
- For this message the author Aule has received thanks:
- tedric