At times in our awareness we erupt into action. All the possible
avenues and all the meaningful ones we had indulged in just prior to this
decision are collapsed into one that enfolds as a series relationships are
effected. Meaning and possibilities are both destroyed and created
even more than just with the drift of awareness. But the two
reductions and creations of meaning are of a kind in being reductions of
meaning by the present with only the action move being a more wholesale
change of meaning connections.
This view of meaning evolution and
its continual reduction and creation by the present with heavier rates of
these through action gives a different and non-dualistic picture of the
old problem of free will. It can be said that meaning or knowledge
as a connection between a subject society and an object society are
inherently an action because the meaning relationship is shaped from an
actual or a potential behavior towards the object. It can be said
that an object society which we know is one where the alliance is not one
of incorporation like food into the body proper but left as alliance like
a partial incorporation waiting for temporary use by the knower.
It's a temporary appendage waiting for use by the knowing society.
To know it or even to think about it is to temporarily flex this action
muscle of the behavioral relationship. From the standpoint of
personal awareness we have different meaning relationships that we can
flex or act on. Each thinking about a choice is a partial action on
that choice. And each thinking about a choice as we skip around our
choices is either reinforced or not into a more complete action. Our
knowledge relationships are then actions in potential that we act on in
conflict with one another until one or another is reinforced enough to no
longer be stoppable from the noise of other knowledge relationships.
This can only happen in creatures like the higher animals which have so
many response circuits that we have learned to cope with the conflicting
circuits. And this is why one can observe animals making movements
in one direction and then in another before finally being overcome by one
of the choices. And similarly this is why people have characters of
decision making where some stay hesitant and in conflict and others act
precipitously with the first good meaningful choice that gets slight
reinforcement.
But this view of free will is
neither of the old categories of free or deterministic. It is not
free in the sense of being able to see all the choices in the universe
equally and clearly and being able to pick independently of our wants.
And it is not deterministic in the sense of stimulus and response.
It is both in that a stimulus provokes many responses from us as meaning
societies which can proceed partially down many of these responses while
changing meaning and then let the resultant reinforcement process of new
and old meaning direct a resonance search that turns one response into a
much less partial action. It is effectively free will and it allows
all meaning relationships including metapatterns such as logic or past
sequences to be used as actions which can be used as reinforcement
patterns.
In the course of time for personal
awareness whether ruminating or acting at the limit of physical
capabilities the process remains the same. Meaning alliances with
others are changing by being reduced or strengthened or reoriented.
The present continually changes the society of subjectivity and the unity
or disunity of its alliances. These changes range from the slight
changes of the brain at rest with only chemical processes having their
regular decay and repair rhythms to the abrupt changes from eruptive and
decisive changes that involve great discontinuities with many alliances.
Subjective societies are formed from
alliances made of potential actions which vie for concertedness or
resonance among them into spikes of more actionable responses as the
alliance societies change over time from within and without.
Quotes
"The totality of references
presented by a meaningfully intended object offers more to hand than can
in fact be actualized at any moment. Thus the form of meaning,
through its referential structure, forces the next step, to
selection." Luhmann, Niklas. Social Systems.
Stanford University Press. 1995. p. 60.
“The need to make a coherent,
conscious scene out of seemingly disparate elements is seen at all levels
and in all modalities of consciousness.” Edelman, Gerald and Tononi,
Giulio. A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter becomes Imagination. Basic
Books. 2000. p. 26.
"A number of more recent writers have made a general distinction between
instructive and selective mechanisms of change and
adaptation (Changeaux, 1985; Piatelli-Palmerini, 1989). An
instructive mechanism is one in which the environment interacts with the
organism in a way that brings about a specific organic change. A
selective mechanism is one in which variants are produced by the organism
in an undirected way and are then subject to environmental selection."
Godfrey-Smith, Peter. Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature.
Cambridge University Press. 1996. p. 87.
Examples
Statement of Point
The conceptscape is contained in
the lifescape, the web of all meaning, which is contained in the universe
of possibilities. Always the unity of the present forces multiplicity into
its reduction as possibilities are terminated. In the human sphere
awareness and action are the two primary reductions into the present; both
are possibilities realized. Life, in general, destroys complexity to
arrive at the present thereby creating new potentials and relationships.
Instead of “free will” life has taken a facsimile route of producing
complex determinants in complex societies (organisms) with an integration
mechanism to continually force the diversity into more unified action.
Living in a society, struggling and surrendering in a body, is to have
emotions, is to struggle and relax as the fit of one’s society into the
larger society of the environment changes; it is to move in rhythms rather
than to move with the conceptscape’s tempo of logic. The conceptscape is
the creation of a collective society of semantic societies where
complexity has been forged into shared relationships.
Bibliography
Further
Considerations