How do I talk my way out of this one

Omni, the reclusive caretaker of Every Topic in the Universe(s?) has been engaging me in a dialogue, trying to flesh out my worldview. He wants to know how I think the cosmos fits together. Good question.

You've been warned: I can't hope to explain all the various philosophies I'm going to breeze through here, that is the stuff of textbooks. I probably don't understand any of them well enough to do you or them justice. For that I'm linking liberally to Wikipedia, which is a good introductory source, to sate whatever curiosity you may have. Please comment with any questions and I'll try and answer them, or at least link you to something.

I think I most closely ally myself with empiricism. It's just too simple and intuitive to not fall in love with. I just don't like placing undue emphasis on Reason, which I think is a deeply flawed human faculty. Nor am I into the Cartesian game of questioning the veracity of my existence and all that crap. It just seems silly to worry about whether my senses are decieving me or if there's some malevolent poultergeist keeping me in the dark. And as the whole of modern (that is, descartes to like, Kant) Philosophical discourse showed, the requirement for absolute certainty that led to "I think there for I am" leads, upon hundreds of years of obsessive over-inspection, to solipsism and extreme philosophical skepticism.

I'd much rather assume, as a starting point, that everything I'll ever need to know will come rushing into my brain from one of the various holes in my skull. Further, I believe that these info holes are more or less accurate in quickening the truth on up to my brain.

There's less to obsess over that way.

It's also a monistic philosophy, which I like--again for simplicity's sake. However you choose to characterize it, as matter, as energy or whatever, there is only one kind of stuff around. This is contrasted with dualism, which, thanks to a certain Jewish carpenter, has been confusing the hell out of the majority of the Western world for two thousand-odd years. It's the whole soul / body problem. If you've never bothered much with philosophy or examining existence, then you're almost definitely a closet dualist. Descartes was a dualist, and one of the most influential thinkers of all time. He has probably had a deeper impact on the mindset of the modern world than Jesus himself.

Seriously.

Have you ever wondered how, if the soul and body are these to totally different and unique things, how could they possibly communicate with each other. Where would be the common ground? Not even Descartes could answer that one.

Monism is intuitively simpler, but it has a few huge problems. Humans are wierd animals, and when we look at the world we tend to see ourselves as fundamentally different than all the other crap lying around. We can think. We can reason. We can take in stimuli, evaluate it, pass judgement upon it, make a decision, and act on that decision. We can then look back and critique ourselves, our performance, our place in the situational context. What other creature can do that? So far it's just us. So we exist in the world, but we seem fundamentally different than the world.

We seem to have free will. This is some crazy shit, especially when it seems pretty obvious that the rest of creation runs algorithmically, constrained by a rigid, non-dynamic set of laws.

That's the draw of dualism. Matter exists in the physical world and is subject to its laws. The soul is somewhere else controlling things somewhere outside the spatio-temporal constraints of the physical world, free to do as it chooses.

The problems with this are legion, and enumerating them will just make me pissy, so suffice it to say I'm a monism man, through and through.

But how then, within a monistic framework, do we reconcile what seems to be free will with the physical world, which seems to be determined?

Short answer: Either free will is an illusion, or the material world is an illusion. The road less travelled, compatibilism, is a tough row to hoe.

I'd like to hoe it for a little while, just to flesh out some ideas I had the other day. I know almost nothing beyond lay science, so if what I'm saying is utterly idiotic, I'm sure Mike will pounce strong and swift. I welcome it.

Compatibilism is like the holy grail of modern scientific empiricism--great to fantasize about, tough to find, and easy to clown of people for believing in. Not that long ago though, when quantum mechanics became shit hot in pseudo-scientific circles, people saw the principle of quantum indeterminacy as the tonic compatibilism needed. There was hope that scientists who like the idea of free will might finally be able to have it both ways.

The problem with this is that, regardless of how particles act at the micro (subatomic) level--how crazy and chaotic those electron clouds can be--the world at a macro level still works like a well-oiled deterministic machine.

There have been further theories presented that quantum indeterminacy isn't quite so indeterminate after all, but this is not yet mainstream thought (I did a paper on this, I'll try to dig up some of my sources--don't hold your breath).

So if quantum level determinacy has no bearing on deterministic laws on a macro (atomic and larger) level, then this doesn't help the free will issue, because brains are macro level things.

The other day though, I had a thought, and I'm throwing this out mainly because I have no idea of what merit it has.

***

I commute and I hate it. What I've done to make it more bearable is listen to happy music and develop operational programs to avoid spending time completely stopped in the 13th most congested traffic system in America.

I noticed that, despite all the insane people dashing in and out of lanes, doing crazy retarded things, if I stopped thinking of my fellow commuters as individuals, and started studying their patterns, I could make it through a commute without coming to a complete stop. Once I figured this out and developed an algorithm--forcing my better judgment (free will) into the passenger's seat. I can now make it to work 10 to 20 minutes more quickly than before. I rock.

As much as I love self-aggrandisement, there is a deeper point. I think this is a good model for the micro-macro dichotomy. If you get bogged down on the level of quanta, where shit is swirling and nothing is predictable, nothing important gets accomplished. If you pull back too far though, you miss the nuances of the algorithm, you just see masses of crap travelling in mostly the same direction.

See where I'm going with this?

What if there is a middle area, somewhere matter at the subatomic level (probably better described as energy) interacts with matter on the macro level. I can really think of no better place for this than in a brain, where larger-than-atomic level structures shoot energy back and forth across vanishingly small expanses. Admittedly, I don't know the nature of neurological firings, what this energy is made up of, but I do know that science has had a hard as hell time trying to map the brain in any meaningful way.

Is it possible that quantum-level energy can exert a non-deterministic push onto the macro level neurons and whatnot, building a kind of pseudo--more like a mitigated--novelty into the structure of the brain as it goes?

This would seem to jive with the way the brain constructs it self from infancy to age, building and destroying pathways, making and breaking connections seemingly at random.

It's probably most likely that we just can't yet get our hands around the laws of neural physics at this point--that time and science will find a deterministic answer.

However unlikely, it's intoxicating to think of a hinterland where indeterminism and determinism coexist and create beautiful novel structures like the human brain.

Anyway this was a flash of thought I had the other day, I've done no research to flesh it out beyond speculation so science buffs: have at me.