Rethinking Free Will and Agency

The question of free will is often phrased as whether we make our own choices or physics, biology, psychology, ..., i.e., external factors, determine all / some of our choices. There is a presupposition in these phrasing of the question - that we are agents acting on a passive environment. Another way to look at what is going on is as a dance. A dance between us and the context we are in. We change the context and the context changes us. The combination drives what dance steps we can do next and which dance steps are not possible because of the nature, geometry, structure of us and the context we are in.

Spectral Thoughts

Attended a talk on Laws of Life from an astrobiological perspective, i.e., are there basic laws / principles that can help us determine life from non-life. This may also shed some light on what forms of life are possible. It occurred to me that is a binary view of life - life and non-life. What if it is really a spectrum - there is a spectrum of complexity, capability, functionality that is arising. Life happens to be one that is past a certain threshold with emergent properties that we find particularly appealing as we happen to be of this form. One can look at universal evolution from energy, to particles, to atoms, to heavy elements, to replicating molecules, life, ...... as a spectrum.

This bring up an interesting question, what is next after life as we know it -  higher levels of complexity, capability, functionality ?   Access to space, time, matter, in ways we can't yet imagine?

Thinking Modes - Spectral, Fractal, ...

I while back I posted on Spectral Thinking. There are numbers of other who are also talking about spectral thinking - 1, 2, 3, .. Continuing the exploration of the modes of thinking, it occurred to me that there is also fractal thinking. This notion was brought on by reading this post. The basic notion that I got from the post is that we are victoms (in a sense) of propaganda machines such as religions, current education systems, cultural myths, ... And that these narratives keep us in an unhealthy geometry of being.

Just as spectral thinking moves us from binary categories to gradients with some form of distribution across that gradient, fractal thinking is about seeing the same pattern at different scales of existence / being. The geometry of one up / one down scales all the way from sub-atomic particles to our behaviors. When two particles unite, each gives up some of its properties. Typically, one side gives up more than the other. When atoms combine to form molecules by sharing electrons, losing electrons, ..., one atom gives up and changes more than the other. These forms of "inequality" are a fractal pattern at different scales of existence.