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Subject: Re: "That Was The Unkindest Cut of All"
Date: Sat, 10 Oct 1998 09:27:25 -0400
From: Frank Mosca
To: Jack Sarfatti
Hi Jack,
That line is from Julius Caesar. Speaking of lines, I am one hundred percent behind your holding the line against the those who simply do not want to deal with your admirable attempts to open up some explanatory space for free will/ freedom in human experience. What you are encountering, IMHO :-), is a deep philosophical resistance that goes beyond any "facts" or reasonable theories in this case. Let us, using your Sherlock Holmes analogy, look at the observables here. Both sides, yours and Stan Klein et. al. have high intelligence and extraordinary scientific expertise operating for them. So it is not a matter that they cannot understand your arguments. They simply do not want to go where you are taking them. So what's new, the debate has been raging from at least Democritus down to the present. So, beyond the provable correctness of your vision or Libet's or anyone else's for that matter, there are some fundamental instincts that are simply not parsable by rational discussion.
In your case, as in mine, you are in touch with an unshakeable sense that to consign human experience to the deterministic mechanics of any system, Democritean, Positivist, or contemporary East coast Dennet like meat machine neuroscience, is to divest that human experience of any meaning. What would your gaining a Nobel prize be, Jack, but an epiphenomenal event tied to the neural viscissitudes of brain architecture, not the inspiration and verve of your level three super implicate order indeterminate self looping through the other levels in a free wheeling rhythm that is the unique, open ended and wondrous manifestation of "what it feels like to be you?"
Some describe you as bull headed or blind to the facts because like a pit bull you simply will not give up your grip on your own inspiration about this issue and your faith that there does indeed exist at a minimum a fundamental configuration to reality that preserves that space and by God you are going to nail down the physics of it once and for all! The implications of your actually achieving that are incredibly profound. What is at stake? Well, there is no better metaphorical explanation than that of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor in the "Brothers Karamazov." If we are meat machines, then we are capable of being tesselated into a socio political mosaic of predetermined relationships. All the nasty and untidy problems of human history disappear and of course, one can understand, that as well, the larger uglier moments vanish as well. There is a deep dread of ourselves abiding here and the last century has not helped assuage that dread.
Thus we dread our freedom because we see it only as potential caprice to savage one another. So for some it has become a religion of scientism to demonstrate once and for all the limits of human complexity so as to give hope that the "dark side of the force" can ultimately be contained by gene manipulation, behavioral context applications and if necessary, direct alterations of brain architecture. That is not to say that advances of that sort might not indeed alleviate many unnecessary sufferings for humans and I am all for that. Rather, the issue is the dread that there lurks somewhere in all of this swirling complexity the equivalent of Koestler's "ghost in the machine," the ever elusive singularity of self that will erupt always, like a series of endless sequels of horror movies "Halloween .......o-o" and break the through the crystalline surface of deterministic tranquility to shatter the quiet dreams of happy robots suddenly once again reminded of the nightmare of their freedom. Yes, Jack, you are like Michael in one of those horror sequels: you simply can't be killed no matter how many times you are destroyed utterly :-)!
You always pop to the surface with your evil Jack Nicholson smile saying "Here's Jack", mathematical axe in hand ready to wreak havoc upon the otherwise tranquil [tranqulized] population of thinkers listening to the soothing symphonies of Dennet and company. This is probably because when they set out to destroy you, they are limited, as in a mythical Buddhist parable, by their own vision that only level one, or perhaps maybe level two exist. When they can't find you there, they assume they are rid of you. But of course, we know that there you are, "lurking" in level three, cheshire grin upon your face ready to break through from implicate to explicate to torture your pursuers yet again :-).
Now of course, some will immediately object that you are not the only one out there defending the notion of freedom and of course, of course that is true. There are fortunately a goodly number of superlative minds engaged in the this holy work :-) and there are legitimate differences of opinion. May the best theory win. But no one does it with such aplomb and panache as you do, so I lend my allegience aesthetically to what is the more dramatically driven theory. After all, who has better lead in titles than you :-) "Jacob wrestles with Gott," "Laurel and Hardy meet Abbot and Costello," "Sarfatti's Wignerian Opera." On those grounds alone I declare your theory to be superior :-). Regards as always,
Frank.
Jack Sarfatti wrote: of the debate in quantum-mind list of University of Arizona, "Which cut?" of Von Neumann's quantum theory of measurement.
The most painful one of course. :-)
Stan Klein would cut consciousness off the body of knowledge.
What is the line from Julius Caesar? Maybe one from Henry VIII as well?
related information is at
http://listserv.arizona.edu/lsv/www/quantum-mind.html
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