Is Freedom So Important? Part 1

"Natural selecton is an explosion of evitability"

So said Daniel Dennett in trying to explain that free will may not necessarily be diametrically opposed to determinism. As a 'compatibilist' he asserts that the possibility of free will evolves, in itself, over time. His explanation being that natural selection may have favoured those who were able to make choices in favour of longevity; illustrated by the example of the person who can decide to duck, to avoid being hit by a flying spear.

The problem is that if you decide on a course of action whereby you remain alive and have avoided the option that could have left you for dead, then surely you're just following nature's programmed, deterministic inclination towards survival. Put simply, because of your programming, you never had the choice to ignore instinctive reflexes and allow yourself to be killed by the spear.

Evitability in this case, Dennett explains, is synonymous with avoidability. If something is 'inevitable' then it is 'unavoidable'. Thus further problems arise when you talk about the future as being inevitable... rather it should be individual events that should be assessed as avoidable or unavoidable.

An interesting rationale for support of Dennett's propsal is given in A Case for Free Will AND Determinism, where the author helps to qualify the concept, as follows:

"Causality provides constraints, not unfreedom. Gravity limits the conditions under which a person can fly, but it does not prevent flying."

Still though there are holes here... you can't pick and choose what ares of existence are governed by causality. Picking up from the above comment, the very idea that you might be able to fly in the first place is the result of any number of preceding phenomena. In essence, the Big Bang happened... and everything since has occurred as a direct result. The development of consciousness is as bound to this as anything else.

And so to the multitude of scenarios that have been envisaged for the technologically enhanced future. Singularitarians declare 'inevitability', transhumanists engage immanentisation... the willed bringing about of the apocalypse, the eschaton, the point where all predictive theory breaks down.

No matter how it all pans out though, no matter whether our meagre brains are able to imagine the futurist's future or not, nothing is guaranteed and nothing is out of the question. But just because certain aspects of our future can or can not be avoided, there is no reason to start looking at the results as anything other than the most recent events in a chain of cause and effect that has been extrapolating for the last 14 billion years.

To be continued...

Digital Evolution

In the future, the success of life within a programmed reality will rely on coherent and flexible streams of code duplicating and mutating in much the same way that our DNA does now. Whether the mechanics of these mutations are driven by our own consciousness or by the will of machines that we will have given prior instruction remains to be seen...





The evolution of our genetic code depends on a series of motivating factors that guide each new mutation, steering the development of our bodies to ensure that they are best suited to our physical environment at any given time. An example of this is the theory that ice age conditions prompted Homo sapiens to develop the guts needed to digest meat because plant life was so scarce.

The challenges presented by our environment (adverse weather, difficult terrain, scarcity of food) have governed the process by which evolution has found its solutions. Living with cold temperatures and rain in some climates has forced us to develop the skills needed to identify or construct suitable shelter. So we have the mouse (evolution) and we have the maze (physical environment). But the mouse won’t even attempt to try and run through the arduous process of trial and error needed to solve the maze unless there’s cheese at the end of it. The cheese is the motivation.

The need to eat, the need to find shelter and the cohesion of a group or herd might be motivating factors that have shaped our evolution over the course of several millennia but they themselves are only in place to facilitate the possibility of reproduction. Evolution in living things is absolutely and entirely powered by reproduction. In this reality, reproduction is the Ultimate Motivating Factor (UMF).

So, how does this apply to the programmed reality? Surely we will have broken through the constraints of sex for procreation, family and herd behaviour that have governed the progress of life up to this point. If reproduction is the UMF behind the replication and mutation of DNA against the backdrop of challenges presented by physical environment, resulting in the beauty and horror of life in its present form, then what’s the equivalent that will apply to our steps beyond transcendence?

When the digital environment becomes conscious, it is going to need a reason to develop, to mutate. Call it God or Mother Nature or Gaia or whatever, but there is a programmer behind our progress. Who’s to say it’s not us in a higher form engineering realities through which we can experience subjective existence? Who’s to say this reality, the ‘Sex Programme’ if you will, isn’t one of many occurring simultaneously across inter-dimensional lines; each driven by different UMF’s?

The point is that if we are to truly step through into the age of intelligent technology and become the programmers, become Gods, then we are going to need to take responsibility for our programming and make sure that we are all clear on what we’re going to say when the machine asks ‘What’s my motivation?’