There is no empty space? — Raymond

All is field, plus 'Nothing' cannot be.

What are field points and how can they oscillate? Are it not the excited wavefunctions that show oscillating behavior? — Raymond

Field points are just the moving continuous points of a field that can be assigned a value. The excitations of a field oscillate, too, as the sums of the harmonic field point oscillations and can make for a stable lump of stuff called a particle.

These wave functions go along deterministically until someone wants to measure something or until they interact with something else. Whoever wants to know both the location and the momentum of a particles is out of luck due to these not being arithmetically commutable due to the uncertainty principle. I and adding this stuff in just to show that we know more about what goes on.

So, some measurements often only return a probability about a particle's doings, but they are statistically deterministic in that the probabilities add up to one, which is called unitarity. After all, we don't know all the quantum math, plus we can't even then take the whole universe into account, plus the elementaries aren't point particles but are spread out field waves that have a volume…

Virtual particles are a weird ingredient of empty space. One might even argue that it's the source of dark energy. For sure it has a different effect on empty space as normal, real matter does. The negative energy contributions give negative curvature. It is said that the vacuum fluctuations have a very high energy, while in fact it should be negative. — Raymond

Well, there's no empty space because all is field, and there's no inert space as Newton had it as a background who's only quantity was value. Einstein got rid of Newton's absolute space, achieving background independence, and there is still no space because quantum fields serve as what used to be called 'space' and are everywhere.

Yes, the 'vacuum' energy could be the source of the push of dark energy, the fuel that ever keeps on giving. In the Casimer experiment the 'vacuum' pushes two plates apart.

As I understand it, at every point in spacetime operator valued distributions are assigned and these operators excite states in a Fock space of particle states. All these states have frequencies and wavelengths and can indeed be seen in the light of oscillators, or rotating complex vectors. But are there really operators present that excite a particle state? Is not a particle state, and it's demise, propagation, or creation what comes first? Are it really creation, destruction, or propagating operators, that govern? — Raymond

I think that the approach of having creation and destruction operators is just another way to model the quantum fields. The fields oscillate on their own; it's not like that there are little springy oscillators attached to field points.

the virtual fields could be pulled into real existence. Quantum bubbles pulled into reality. inflation would be solved. — Raymond

Well, we know that the universe grew very large in a hurry, which could already be called an 'inflation' as a normal word and that there is a humongous, even extravagant amount of material, like 2x10**76 or so particles, indicating that material is very easy to come by. The 2x part is to include antimatter, and the 10**76 part began as 10**85 because there are now ten billion photons for every proton and so there were 10**9 or so annihilations of matter and antimatter early on.

The proposed inflation would have driven the virtual particles and their anti-particles faster than they could recombine and annihilate. We still need a lot of positive kinetic energy to have come forth and gravity can supply it because its negative potential energy can grow more negative without bound. This doesn't violate the law of energy conservation because the net energy amount remains constant, as zero or near zero.

The quantum fields are lightweights and and probably don't have enough energy, although they got predicted to have energy that was 121 orders of magnitude too large, which was the most embarrassing notion in science, perhaps because they should have instead looked to gravity for the energy.

If we find a lot of gravity waves way back that have a lot of b-mode polarization then we can better hone in on what kind of inflation there was. Inflation also flattens the universe, which makes it work out better than it having curvature. I don't know if the new telescope does any of that WMAP kind of stuff.

(There's no 'true vacuum' because all is field.)

That's where the "free won't" comes in, giving us an opportunity to veto the action — Gnomon

"us" is still the subconscious brain will analysis going on just like always.

Is there an oscillator attached to all points in space? — Raymond

From Wiki:

Given the equivalence of mass and energy expressed by Albert Einstein's E = mc2, any point in space that contains energy can be thought of as having mass to create particles. Virtual particles spontaneously flash into existence at every point in space due to the energy of quantum fluctuations caused by the uncertainty principle. Modern physics has developed quantum field theory (QFT) to understand the fundamental interactions between matter and forces, it treats every single point of space as a quantum harmonic oscillator. According to QFT the universe is made up of matter fields, whose quanta are fermions (i.e. leptons and quarks), and force fields, whose quanta are bosons (e.g. photons and gluons). All these fields have zero-point energy.[2] Recent experiments advocate the idea that particles themselves can be thought of as excited states of the underlying quantum vacuum, and that all properties of matter are merely vacuum fluctuations arising from interactions of the zero-point field.[10]

Many physical effects attributed to zero-point energy have been experimentally verified, such as spontaneous emission, Casimir force, Lamb shift, magnetic moment of the electron and Delbrück scattering.[12][13] These effects are usually called "radiative corrections".[14] In more complex nonlinear theories (e.g. QCD) zero-point energy can give rise to a variety of complex phenomena such as multiple stable states, symmetry breaking, chaos and emergence. Many physicists believe that "the vacuum holds the key to a full understanding of nature"[8] and that studying it is critical in the search for the theory of everything. Active areas of research include the effects of virtual particles,[15] quantum entanglement,[16] the difference (if any) between inertial and gravitational mass,[17] variation in the speed of light,[18] a reason for the observed value of the cosmological constant[19] and the nature of dark energy.[20][21]

It's more reasonable there 20 massless basic fields — Raymond

The number 25 matches the number of entries now in the Standard Model.

What oscillates if you say that the field is a collection of oscillators? — Raymond

The whole field fluctuates from the continuous field points oscillating; the points are not separate from one another; there can't be any spacers of the impossible 'Nothingness' anywhere.

Now, is there anything non physical or spooky going on in the fields? No, because the elementary particles and forces are physical, and since they are the field quanta outright, the quantum fields are purely physical.

So it follows that the universe is wholly physical!

You can construct all with two, — Raymond

Well, protons and neutrons consist of electrons and up and down quarks that trade off with gluons sort of.

So, then, to continue, it makes logical sense that the elementaries have to be arrangements of their quantum fields as their excitations since that's all the fields have to work with. This theory is tested by modeling the field points as harmonic oscillators that tug at the other points, making for the field waverings as the sum of these oscillations, from which, in short, the quantum aspect comes about from the wave nature. The infinities get renormalized away.

The model works, especially for Quantum Electro Dynamics (QED), which is the jewel of Quantum Field Theory (QFT), for it has accuracy up to 11 decimal points and lets us produces devices that work. When an electron goes down by a quantum the electron field interacts with the photon field to produce a photon, making light. So it is that some of the the quantum fields can interact.

There are 25 quantum field types, all atop one another, making for one overall quantum field. The Higgs field is interesting in that its energy is higher than that of the other fields. The term 'zero point energy' is used for the average of a field's energy but it isn't zero.

So now we have the astounding insight that the quantum fields exhaust reality as being all that there is! Astounding progress!

P.S.

So, the elementaries are constituted of quantum fields, and not of any new and distinct substance, which would be not only be impossible but would make them Fundamental by themselves. One cannot get something (new) from from Something Fundamental and one cannot get Something Fundamental from 'Nothing'. A Fundamental is Necessity. 'God' is not required.

Onward next time.

I think there are two truly elementaries. — Raymond

The up and down quark and the electron seem to be the most useful. There are also forces.

So, in short for now, the elementaries are directly the quantum excitations of their respective quantum fields and they can move along their fields like a kink in a rope can move along a rope. Thus, the elementaries are the fields' quanta.

Why is there no Stillness in the quantum fields? Logically, naught would have happened, and physically the uncertainty principle causes quantum fluctuations. So, 'Stillness' is impossible. Parmenides thought that his One didn't have to do anything but he was wrong in that area.

Why not Nothing, as a lack of anything? Well, Something is and 'Nothing' is not. The Fundamental(s) Existent(s) are mandatory, having no option not to be, having no alternative. A partless continuous Fundamental cannot be be made, for there are no parts to make it of, nor can it go away, for it cannot be broken into parts. Thus, 'Beginning' and 'End' for a Fundamental are impossible. Parmenides got this right, saying that his One is "ungenerated and deathless" and even that 'Nothing' cannot even be meant.

That is probably the state of the massless particles in quarks and leptons. There are only two kinds of them, the minimum needed to construct all of matter from. Again, dualism in the bedrock. — Raymond

The quarks and leptons are elementary in the particle realm, yes, but they are not First/Fundamental overall because all the elementaries of a type in the Standard Model are identical, meaning that they are woven by the same type of weave, plus, while they can be rather persistent, they can be annihilated; so, they are secondary. Further, we see that they occur only at specific stable rungs of quanta and so their weave is seen to be all the more as having to be manufactured, and from the same type of cloth. We further see that in the 2-slit experiment the elementaries have a wave nature, and waves fit the Fundamental Arts, as being continuous and having no parts.

In 3D, a wave is a field, and a field simply means that there is a value at every spacetime point. Think of a temperature field or a water field; however, in the classical fields mentioned the lumps of crests/troughs will slosh away and the lumps of hot/cold areas will intermix, but the quantum elementary lumps can continue on their own since they are stable when they don't crash and their field is everywhere. The would-be particles that don't reach the quantum level come and go all the time quite quickly, they being known as virtual particles.

The bedrock is in sight. That's good for now since my lady says it's time for bed.

The basic fundamentals, the fundamentals from which all is made, cannot be eliminated. as these are fundamental. — Raymond

True, and so to find the basic we look toward the simplest state.

The philosopher who knows how to combine them all has yet to be born. — Raymond

We can eliminate the complexities and even the composites as being Fundamental, for they would have parts that would have to be even more Fundamental.

I am not sure if this relates to your topic but some people believe that the current climate change and some other problems are the vengeance of God. The Old Testament shows that God has a wrathful anger as well as having the loving and forgiving aspects represented by the figure of Jesus. — Jack Cummins

Another problem with the 'God' supposition is that, say, He could stop the virus, extinctions, and so forth, but He doesn't and never did; so, this isn't really a "hands off' approach absolving Him, but an intention of letting disasters happen, and thus responsible for them. With a friend like 'God', one doesn't need enemies.

It will be too late tomorrow. — Raymond

Yes, but it's hard to stop the doomsday glacier from melting in the next few years and raising the sea level ten feet, which amount surprised me. A Yellowstone eruption is 30,000 years overdue, also hard to stop. Locally, in New York, we had a second Indian summer in December.

I think you did a good job laying out your vision and I think it is worth talking about. I'm surprised RN or someone else hasn't responded yet. — T Clark

Maybe he's stuck at an airport or on a long vacation.

My first objection is that you have mixed your physics and metaphysics. They don't belong together. That's kind of a knee-jerk reaction. I'll reread your post and see if I have more to say. — T Clark

It's more of a purposeful mix of philosophical logic and science since they seem to agree. What's missing or needs clarification?

No philosopher, or any other mortal soul, will ever be able to see the whole rock. — Raymond

Anton Zeilinger claims to have found that the bedrock of reality is randomness, to 3-sigma or more. Do you think the bedrock has to be more than just something simple?

the Whole of which our world is an active part is a Singularity : no parts — Gnomon

Yes, the simplest.

Plan or "Planner" — Gnomon

In science, there is one thing, mass-energy, and it is conserved, unable to be created or destroyed; so, it just is, as the base existent that has to be, given no alternative, akin to the fields in motion of the quantum ‘vacuum’ due to the uncertainty principle that prohibits stillness. Quantum systems constantly fluctuate in their lowest energy state as described by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, even at absolute zero temperature. There is no such thing as a ‘true vacuum’.

There seems to be tendency in First Philosophy thinking to still ever posit some higher level from which the simplest obtains, albeit that the simplest can’t even be built, it having no parts.

Yet, still, meta-, super-, extra-, and hyperphysical realms are proposed, as if automatically they ought to be there. They haven’t showed up at all during the history of the universe: no shortcuts, no miracles, nothing non-physical.

So, still, for the average believer, that’s where the thinking ends, case closed, no further analysis. The Bible said so.

The more responsible believers, some even theologians, note the begging of the question that leads toward an infinite regress of ever having to explain something as having to come from a greater Something even though they’ve already cleverly declared non physical meta-stuff to be responsible, albeit unwarranted and unseen.

The first wrong step in direction was to deny that the simplest can give rise to the more and more complex, just as we see in our universe, but to think that the complex has to give rise to the simplest.

To try to salvage the wrong step, it then gets declared that the great Meta or Hyper is of infinite power so that the buck can stop there—and so they can now drop the template that says the lesser can only come from the Greater.

Whatever that First Cause was, we infer that it had the Potential for Life & Mind & Willful behavior in its creatures. — Gnomon

Yes, but not made from a Higher Will, for not even a composite can be First, much less the complexity of a Planner. There's no Big Guy named Will.

Does it make sense to hold people accountable for their actions given that there is no free will? — T Clark

Yes.

Defendant: Your honor, the universe made me do it, so please don’t sentence me.

Judge: Yes, true, it did, but we still have to lock you up until the universe doesn’t make you do it anymore, for we have to protect society, plus learning may happen, if you are able.

…

‘Free will’ is reduced to indicating that the will is able to operate, which is no great shake, or that one’s actions are not being coerced, whether by another person or by the weather or whatnot, which position is known as compatibilism, but this, too, grants us no real revelation or insight. Besides, the coercion was going to happen, too, as an effect from the causes that it had. The will is just the will—a neural network that votes according to what it has become up to that moment.

The judicial courts differentiate between ‘responsible’ versus ‘coerced’ (by another or via metal ills), this axis being orthogonal to the main axis of ‘free will’ versus ‘fixed will’ or ‘undetermined versus determined’, which the judges hardly get into, although there are cases in which defendants plead their bad nurture or nature, or, as of late, that addicts need help rather than being incarcerated as criminals.

Sadly, claims to such finds are not rare at all, and to date all I have encountered have be vacuous. — Reformed Nihilist

Yes, indeed, as I too have had to refute over the last thirty years and more.

Here's the promised gist:

Since there is something, a lack of anything is out, plus there is no sequence in time from nonbeing to being because ‘Nothing’ has no time, nor anything else, nor can ‘Nothing’ have any properties, so nor can ‘it’ be. ‘It’ isn’t, and so that’s the end of ‘it’.

So, given that Something has no alternative, it is everywhere and continuous because it cannot have any spacers of ‘Nothing’ in it. Because it is continuous and never created, it is partless and is thus the simplest state, for a composite cannot be fundamental. As having no parts, the Something is unbreakable into parts as well as being unmakeable from parts, thus it cannot be generated or go away; so, it is eternal, as being ever, and so there isn’t anything else but it. It is permanent. See also ‘Parmenides’, who shocked the philosophic world, and still does, about the One.

The Something cannot be still, else naught would happen; so, we can assign movement to it as a truth, thus it is energetic. Since the elementary particles are lightweights, so does it follow, too, that the Something is a lightweight, just as it has to be, as the simplest state.

Forms from it cannot be new and different from the Something, thus forms such as elementary particles can only become through arrangements of the Something. Since the elementaries are rather persistent, there is a way that these lumps of Something can be made to be stable. We see that they occur at certain rungs of energy levels and not others, which we call quanta, so again, there is something inherent that allows for these steady formations. We see that all the elementary ‘particles’ of a type are identical, this further indicating that they are woven of the same cloth.

Since electrons or photons sent even one at a time through two slits makes an interference pattern, they must have a spread out wave nature, indicating also that they are not pinpoints. While we refer to them as elementary particles, they, of course, are secondary, and so they are elementary only as ‘particles’.

Look up QFT (Quantum Field Theory)!

To continue the philosophy, we can now refer to the Something as the Permanent. What it forms are mostly temporaries, the entire universe, even, although photons don’t seem to decay by themselves and ought to be all that’s sparsely left at the End of the Universe as forms.

Being of necessity, having no alternative, the Permanent requires no creation by ‘God’. Just as we see in the universe, the progression up to now went from the simple to the composite to the more and more complex. Not even the tiny proton can be the First, for it is a composite of quarks.

The Permanent ‘lesser’ simplest makes for the ‘greater’ temporaries in terms of complexity, yet the ‘lesser’ always wins, in a way, because it ever remains, for the ‘greater’ complexities don’t last. Even the elementaries can get annihilated. Still, the Permanent is boring, as we knew the TOE would be, while the temporaries can be interesting.

The religious template of the lesser always having to come from the greater was always a doomed notion, lest an infinite regress ensues, for one, and this is not seen, for two, and the Permanent is of necessity, for three. The notion of ‘God’ fails.

The Permanent is strictly physical because the secondary quanta that are physical are directly the quanta of the Permanent.

We now also know that there needn’t be just one universe, for the permanent ever remains and so it could make another universe. Thus, the Big Bang came from it and not from an impossible ‘Nothing’.

I propose that the Quantum ‘vacuum’ is the Permanent, for its modes of excitations would be what gives rise to the elementaries.

Note that Newton’s absolute time and space have fallen, as well as the notion of the ‘particles’ making the fields. What’s left as fundamental is what is being described here.

We can model the Permanent Quantum ‘Vacuum’ as spacetime points that ever move, these points forming a continuum that we can readily call a field since there is a value at every point. The sums of these harmonic oscillations form a wavering field, each point tugging at the next. In short, the wave nature gives rise to the formation of stable quanta.

A complication is that there are 25 quantum fields modeled, one for each entry in the standard model, these fields all atop each other, some of these fields interacting with other fields, making for one large mathematically complicated overall field. Further mathematical complexity arises from the wanna-be ‘particles’ that don’t have an energy quantum, these being the unstable ‘virtual particles’ that form and go away rather quickly.

Victor Toth says, We decompose a quantum field into harmonic oscillators, since that’s what the field does, with its moving points, though a Fourier-transform, each point now as a quantum harmonic oscillator whose energy comes in quantized units.

The lowest energy state is not zero when we sum for all possible values so we get an infinite result.

When a theory is renormalizable, there’s a mathematically sensible process to discard the unwanted infinities but still account for finite differences, which are responsible for observables. We may sum energies to some finite cutoff value, and use it to compute physically observable values;
in the limit of the cutoff going back to infinity, the physical prediction doesn’t change.

On the other hand, while it's an inference based on a small amount of information, I suspect that what you have to say will be entirely uninteresting and unconvincing to me. I guess I'll leave it up to you while letting you know that your post comes across as lacking not just the social humility that be a turn off to people (I sometimes lack that), but more importantly the intellectual humility that allows people to take you seriously as a thinker. Leastways, that's how it looks to me. — Reformed Nihilist

Normally, yes, but there is cause to celebrate and be sure when the philosophical logic matches the most successful theory in all of science! It's no time for humility. Don't fall for "how it looks", although that may work for the run-of the-mill claims, but not so for me or the conclusion that quantum fields exhaust reality that such as Carlo Rovelli finds in one of his books after carefully ruling out other absolutes that have fallen by the wayside..

I'll put a general post together soon, right after dinner, as you would be very interested, indeed, in First Principles/Philosophy. Let us be as positive as we can be, for those finds are rare to come across.

Hmmm! Meant by whom to do what? — Gnomon

Not by "whom", but to do what they have to do as how they are. How would the will not follow the will? What other source would do the willing instead?

the attempt to create/discover some fundamental bedrock of certainty upon which we can build a foundation for all knowledge and wisdom. Some singular truth that is irrefutable and inerrant from which we can derive the other truths of the universe. It's a little analogous to the search for a fundamental indivisible particle, upon which all matter must be bult on. — Reformed Nihilist

The focus of this thread is solving 'First Philosophy' and thus becoming certain of it. I have done it, and can even match the philosophical logic to it's confirmation by science! Of course, I build on the work of others. I derive the necessary permanent existent of the simplest and only thing, later found to be the quantum 'vacuum' and its overall quantum field, the elementaries made from its fields' quantum level stable arrangements due to the fields' inherent wave nature. You can probably work it out. It's simple, just as the basis of all has to be.

At the moment of the big bang there was something. — Athena

I was thinking about the "from nothing" part. Since there is no time passing in the lack of anything called 'Nothing', it's not like there was 'Nothing' and then there was something; so, I'd claim that the something that is always there is what banged. Besides, 'Nothing' cannot have being and so there is no alternative to something being.

That cosmic and biological evolution took long also indicates a purely natural and physical process continuing, and so I think that universes can ever happen from the whatever something that is ever a what.

took a very long time to evolve out of nothing — Athena

'Nothing' lacks time, so there's no "very long time".

we have an inboard motor to allow us to go against the flow . . . to some degree — Gnomon

The inboard motor of neuronal analysis still does what it has to as what it was meant to do.

Fixed Will 'Poetry Slam' Discussion

Ah, in the whole you’re just afraid of being unfree,
But, hey, look, behold! There is still so much beauty!
A sublime law, indeed, else what beauty could there be?
The coin’s other side speaks—a toss up, weighted equally.

It’s from the finding of truth—not of fright,
Though determinism’s not a pretty sight.
Beauty exists either way, for there is still novelty,
But ‘determined’s opposite is an impossible currency.

Inconceivable!! — TiredThinker

To continue the philosophy, we can now refer to the Something as the Permanent. What it forms are mostly temporaries, the entire universe, even, although photons don’t decay by themselves and ought to be all that’s sparsely left at the End as forms.

Being of necessity, having no alternative, the Permanent requires no creation by ‘God’. Just as we see in the universe, the progression up to now went from the simple to the composite to the more and more complex.

The Permanent ‘lesser’ simplest makes for the ‘greater’ in terms of complexity, yet the ‘lesser’ always wins because it ever remains, for the ‘greater’ complexities don’t last. Even the elementaries can get annihilated.

The religious template of the lesser always having to come from the greater was always doomed, lest an infinite regress ensues, for one, and this is not seen, for two, and the Permanent is of necessity, for three. The notion of ‘God’ fails.

The reason I think this is because it seems that an absolute, philosophical ‘nothing’ would make ‘something’ impossible. — Paul Michael

Since there is something, a lack of anything is out, plus there is no sequence in time form nonbeing to being because 'Nothing' has no time, nor anything else, nor can 'Nothing' have any properties, nor can 'it' be.

So, given that Something has no alternative, it is everywhere and continuous because it cannot have any spacers of 'Nothing' in it. Because it is continuous and never created, it is partless and is thus the simplest state, for a composite cannot be fundamental. As having no parts the Something is unbreakable into parts as well as being unmakeable from parts, thus it cannot be generated or go away; so it is eternal, as being ever, and there isn't anything else but it.

The Something cannot be still, else naught would happen; so, we can assign movement to it as a truth, thus it is energetic.

Forms from it cannot be new and different from the Something, thus forms such as elementary particles can only become through rearrangements of the Something. Since the elementaries are rather persistent, there is a way that these lumps of Something can be made to be stable. We see that they occur at certain rungs of energy levels and not others, which we call quanta, so again, there is something that allows for these steady formations.

Since electrons or photons sent even one at a time through two slits makes an interference pattern, they must have a spread out wave nature, indicating also that they are not pinpoints. While we refer to them as elementary particles, they, of course, are secondary, and so they are elementary only as ‘particles'.

Look up QFT (Quantum Field Theory)!

christians think something can create something. but it cant. even if a god existed he would not be able to make a creation.

what did he make it from? and where did he make it? its like pulling a rabbit out of a hat. magical thinking

something cannot come from something

we currently already have something, and logically it must be eternal and omnipresent and infinite and therefore there is no real creation. only evolution and transformation — Miller

This post is great. There is what there is as likely the simplest partless thing which for some base reason has to move, making for waves which make for the quantum formations from its stable arrangements, not anything new and different than itself.

that is more than the sum of sensory inputs — Gnomon

I don't think anyone is saying the sensory inputs make for the whole of the will's analysis. There's lots more going on, plus rumination is a feedback loop.

The more information the will has, the better it works. Certain information is much greater than the average info, such as the realization that being in charge is an illusion, ironically, for that lets one know all the more that some seemingly bright idea needn't be totally fallen for simply because one came up with it.

Yes, but is that feeling of being in control of your life a truism or an illusion? — Gnomon

Illusion. "More than" hasn't been found.

Were you in Vietnam fighting through the worst of it? I was at the tail end.

Mystical…

Happy birthday and plenty of 'glorious experiences', to enable you to make more pictures and poems. — Jack Cummins

Thanks, Jack.

Some great scenes, music, and poem story:

That may be true, but randomness also breaks the chain of Cause & Effect with an Acausal link. It's that gap in causation that may provide a way to escape from the bonds of Determinism. But, it takes intelligence and reasoning ability to take advantage of the opportunity of arbitrariness in place of necessity. :smile: — Gnomon

You're a great responder, Gnomon, very good and pleasant over the years;, so let me say 'Thanks'. I turned 74 today and have had good luck so far; the world can't seem to kill me off, not even back in Cambodia when I was an intelligence officer at rare times in the field, but was mostly in Honolulu with ladies. Now the virus can't catch me, either, nor the doomsday glacier in Antartica that may soon crumble and greatly raise the sea level. These are epic times.

Sabine Hossenfelder has been espousing Super Determinism of late, if you want to look into it, and so here we are, between its specter and the escape as the randomness option, of all the binds and rocks and hard places to be in…

Well, it seems that the great benefit of the universe is that we get to have glorious experiences, sometimes, even if we are actors portraying ourselves in a play. I've always felt in charge, and that seems to have added to the pleasure.

What's the difference between "fixed will" and "free will"? — Gnomon

"Free will" is what sounds good to have because it announces that the will is free of something than no one is ever able to say but for that the will can usually operate, but that is not adding anything because that's what the will normally is. So, ‘free will’, on the surface, seems to be a great thing to have, for it promises one to be free of some constraint, which must be a good thing, right? Is the will/brain free to operate in the way that it does? Well, usually, outside of the control of parents, employers, owner, gods, and the like who can have forcing methods, so this kind of ‘free’ is not adding anything extra to the regular will, since mechanisms like the will are already free to operate.

In Earthly judicial courts, coercion/controlling/forcing/insanity, etc. can serve to have one judged as not responsible versus being held responsible. Note that this diametric is orthogonal to the other axis—that of a fixed will dependent on what one has become up to the moment versus a non-fixed (free?) will not depending on anything, if one still wants that in order to be ‘free’ (‘twould be a mess—not anything could function).

Does one want to be free of the consistency that the will provides, based on who we are from what we’ve become? No, this would not be the ‘free’ of free will. For the religious, does it mean to be able to be free of God’s will? No, for this is not ‘free’ since there will be consequences. What, then, is there for the will to be free of that is not some trivial finding? No one can say!

The closest we can answer this is the stance that compatibilists take, which again is no great shakes at all, for they still have it that all events are determined, which strangely makes for a free will for them but for when one is coerced into doing something, since their ‘free’ state is merely the freedom from coercion, for they grant determinism. Did they consider that the coercion was always going to happen, too, in the whatever will be will be? Other restraints upon doing what we like are such as the weather, laws, people, and more. A truly free will seems to have no real meaning, yet still remains a kind of Holy Grail hope to find somehow. When they can't push the idea forward, they may try some diversionary push-back.

Is it totally bound…? — Gnomon

Not if there is 'random', but otherwise it does as it has to. We see that 'random' harms the will if it messes up the path the will was taking.

Is there a way to measure the degree of fixation? — Gnomon

The deeper the fixation, the harder it is to learn or get deprogrammed. Some may be so stuck that we just ignore them. Every family seems to have one of those among their relatives.

Who do you think is punishing us with the desire for freedom without the power to choose? — Gnomon

No one can say what other way the will could be free of itself. No punishments, but perhaps there's some evolutionary advantage.


As for Super Determinism, this is just determination all the way through, with no 'random'.

pro:

1. The Block Universe is so. (Plus, 'God' knows everything, to the dismay of theologians.)

2. The quantum particle measurements ending in probabilities may be…

2a. because we can't take the influence of the entire universe into account or

2b. since the wave function proceeds deterministically before measurement, that's that, and since the particle is not a pinpoint but is spread out we can't have a precise location just stabbing into some part of it, which may also disrupt it, or

2c. it is already determined how the scientist will probe it that correlates with the result, making science useless.

con:

1. The eternal bedrock of reality can't have any input to it (yet there could be the most simplistic default of the way it has to be).

If you are not free to choose between Sense and Nonsense — Gnomon

The fixed will chooses all the time; it's mostly about providing for future. A bright fixed will can still be sensible. Or a will may not have good inputs and go for what turns out to be nonsense. The neural analysis considers what it holds and all the inputs. Restraints and forces against what the will wants are inputs, too. I could even grant that the brain waves of others are inputs, also—just another input! Billions of neurons with trillions of connections then do their analysis. Thinking may be flawed and neurotransmitters may not be sufficient to carry the signal across the synapse, but these are just more inputs.

We see that 'random' doesn't make for free will. Some may take consolation that the hurting of the will by 'random' provides for something different to happen. Perhaps there is no 'random'; I'm looking into this now. That would be a super shock!

Who is this "Will" you speak of? — Gnomon

Brain. Fire at Will!

THE OTHER SHOE DROPS

Determinism doesn’t sit well, at first;
Its flavor does not quench the thirst,
For then it seems we but do as we must,
But, we’ll see a way that in this we’ll trust.

We wish that our thoughts reflect us today,
Our leanings, for it could be no other way.
To know, let us turn to the ‘random’ say
To see whatever could make its day.

Shifting to this other, neglected foot,
What could make the ‘random’ take root?
It would have no cause beneath to explain
The events, they becoming of the insane.

We could pretend, imitating air-heads,
Posting nonsense on purpose in the threads,
But that then we meant to do this way,
Noting history, too, so ‘random’ holds not its sway.

There’s less problem of a determined Nature
Than the same in our individual nature,
But, sense isn’t made from ‘random’ direction
That relies on naught beneath its conception.

Would we wish it to be any other way?
Doing any old thing of chance that may?

The ‘random’ foot then walks but here and there,
Not getting anywhere, born from nowhere.
The unrooted tree lives magically, unfathomed.
Is not then ‘randomness’ but a fun phantom?

The opposite of determined is undetermined,
The scarier ghost that’s never-minded.