Once my friend, who happens to be Thoughtful Phoenix on "Chasing Mists", commented to me that my ideas on Free Will seemed to him like reverse logic; I was, in essence, taking what I wanted to be true (Free Will) and forcing it onto a universe that was against it. Aside from my argument that science seems decidedly neutral on the question of Free Will, he was mistaking my intent. I don't WANT Free Will, it's just that any belief contrary to Free Will makes the entire exercise necessarily pointless and scripted. So what do I want?
Before answering this question, I would like to construct a (very rough and imprecise) sketch of something I believe without having any real reason to (this is why this post is not part of My System):
The Six Levels of Sentience:
Category 0 Sentience: Non-sentient. Includes almost everything in the universe, such as rocks, planets, stars, and man-made objects like cars and houses and such.
Category 1 Sentience: Replicating and data-storing systems. Category 1 sentience includes bacteria, prions, viruses, computer viruses, computers (to an extent), and even organisms as complex as plants, although plants should actually fall between categories 1 and 2. Category 1 Sentient entities have very primitive objective functions, i.e. they 'desire' to replicate, but these are not true objective functions since they are not self-aware.
Category 2 Sentience: Primitive self-aware systems. Includes animals (basically anything with a few sensory organs and a nervous system). These organisms have objective functions (i.e. "want food") and basic emotions, and can take direct action to get what they want. However, they lack true self-awareness, and cannot imagine (i.e. consider things that are not real and will never have a hope of being real).
Category 3 Sentience: Developed self-awareness. Can imagine and create. Basically, this category includes only humans. Have fully thought-out and self-aware objective functions and can take actions to fulfill objectives, but are sometimes thwarted by inability of conscious free will to subvert subconscious control (i.e. a fat person unable to diet).
Category 4 Sentience: Like Category 3 Sentience but can directly manipulate its own sentient structure to produce improved versions of itself. For example, if I were a Category 4 Sentience, I would manipulate my own intelligence levels to ever higher strengths, manipulate myself into liking foods and actions (like exercise) that are good for my body, and manipulate my objective functions to be perpetually happy (essentially, turn my body and part of my mind to preserving my existence, and the rest to expanding my pleasure capacity). Category 4 Sentience is the category that will undergo the Technological Singularity, if it ever happens.
Category 5 Sentience: Totally fictional. Possesses a perfect will and perfect knowledge of its own objective function, and so will always act the same way in the same situations (a.k.a. no Free Will). Possesses self-awareness and pleasure capacity equal to the physical limit. Will always take the optimum action in every situation.
So this is what I want. I don't want Free Will. I want to use Free Will to achieve a state where Free Will is replaced by optimum determinism, i.e. as close an approximation of Category 5 Sentience as is physically possible. I want to be optimally happy for as much time as is possible.
I want to go to heaven, but, since it doesn't exist after death, I wish to create it for life.
For Category 5 Sentiences, what do you mean by having a perfect will? Since perfect knowledge of "its own objective function" (which I take to mean the way that it works unless you believe that humans have an objective function in the universe) doesn't mean that you don't have free will, instead either that you have perfect free will (since you are ultimately enlightened about what you want, thus you have as much control as you possibly can) or that you just know your every mental process.
ReplyDeleteIf it means that you know every single mental process, it may illuminate to you that you don't have free will. But knowledge doesn't change facts, it simply changes what you can do with the facts. Thus knowing that your brain is deterministic doesn't change the fact that your brain is deterministic. Thus you would never have had free will in any of the levels of sentience which rely on a brain (assuming that all brains in function relatively the same fashion, which one could argue about via biology).