Ok, I do believe I understand what you are saying. And, though I did not know this, consciously, I think it lends to my notion that we are actually all somewhat autistic. Lost in our own worlds. Only most of us understand and or misunderstand together, or in step with the majority of our peers. Those too distant from average, well, there are difficulties. Though I would guess it is better, even so, to be on top of that wave.

Thank you for the enlightenment. I still have some things I am not quite sure about. I will ponder these, just a bit. *throws a dart at the dart board, through the hurricane… Bullseye!* Ha! 🙂

I am not sure but that we might be talking beside each other. I do believe I understand your points. Sincerely, I understand that we need input, to some extent, to seed our considerations, to begin to create or develop thoughts. Much like muscles need extensions and contractions to work or grow. However, I am speaking directly about when a thought is actually occurring. Is the physical manifestation of that thought creating the thought, or is the thought developing the chemical chain?

I see where it would have to be a mixed medium, I suppose it could be said, not dissimilar to the muscles involved with walking. It isn’t one muscle, and the sequence is mixed and so fast that at my last understanding, the sequence had not been sorted out. I am sure there is such an interplay between the idea and the brain chemistry and the physical brain itself. Though perhaps these things are better understood these days?

As well, I have some suspicion that we are autistic. Perhaps not to the level of the severally (comparatively) autistic children we commonly refer our considerations toward, but autistic compared to our greater potential. How much of reality at any one time do we understand, absorb, react to and with, and share and see? How much consciously, unconsciously? I am sorely aware of the fact that I am not aware at all, from time to time. A bit frightening, but once accounted for, just a realization and not to be fretted about (much as gravity, as one learns of the Earth’s polar, solar, et. al. rotations).

Doom: “Does our thought create the matter change, or does the the matter change originate the thought.”

I’m a process nut, so it’s all transaction, interaction and either/ors are beyond my ken. Without an objective reality to provoke our sensory system and challenge us with its recalcitrance, we’d be profoundly autistic. However, all we ever know of that reality is what our sensory system indicates of it. Think of it as wearing gloves to handle something. All your sensations are of the glove on the skin, but that doesn’t mean the template of what you feel is invalid. So long as your experience enables reliable predictions and practical operations/actions, you have the only truth available–and the only truth of significance. So the material world never originates thought; it is the occasion for sensory data which always invites our representation and analysis. On the other hand, the representation and analysis we call thought would not occur without the occasioning material world. It is a transactional process.

The direct acquisition of objective reality is a red herring invoked largely to justify solipsism–for which the obvious rebuttal is the reality of society. We have pragmatic information (yielding predictions and enabling functional operations) held in common by social groups.

We are unlocking some aspects of the dimension of evil. I know some who are physicalist reductionists wince at the use of the word “evil.” But it exists as both a spiritual and physical reality.

Maybe? Though for me, faith will suffice. Still, the work would be interesting. Far beyond most, however, maybe all if one believes that proof of God cannot be found. Careful about another Tower of Babel? Wing it.

Thanks, no I haven’t, but I’d like to. Do you have a reference?

Many years ago as a medic in the Navy I did dressing changes on infants in the dependents ward that had had surgery on our service. I soon learned that if I approach a child’s crib in a white lab coat, he’d start to cry before I touched him. On the other hand, if I went from surgery to the ward in scrub greens, I could often change a dressing without a cry. The whiteness of the lab coat (let’s call it a sign) elicited the crying response. Even older children will often start crying at the first sight of a doctor’s office, and nothing a parent can do or say will stop the reaction. The pairing of sign and significance is absolute.

But the infant’s world is very unstable. Sometimes the white approaches with a painful injection, sometimes with a bottle, sometimes with a clean diaper, etc. Here’s where your idea of probability enters: so long as there is only determinism, singularity–one gross sign, one gross response–the world cannot stabilize for the child. The child must achieve a greater information context for the sign. When the child can recognize the difference between a nurse carrying a hypodermic and a nurse carrying a bottle, the possibility of different significations within the context arises. So polysemy, at least in information processing, may push probability assessment. But there is another factor involved. The infant must reach the point developmentally that they are able to defer/mediate response pending assessment of context. Physiological and cognitive development are surely mutually enabling. One the absolute pairing of sign and significance launches the affect, you cannot reason with the child. You may be able to distract it with toys, etc. So the child must be able to mediate between sign and immediate affective response. Like many liberals and other adults, the child finds that difficult. But what is it that mediates the sign-significance conjunction? Context. An informational complex in which some things are more probable than others, and which must be assessed according to the probability. For example, a doctor’s office in my mind is a context of informational items I’d expect to be part of the doctor’s office context, some more probable, some less. (One of the reasons why metaphor is so useful informationally is that it enables a contextual transaction unavailable in “literal” language. Hence the joy of poetry. As a side note, children almost always take metaphor literally or simply don’t understand it.)

Free will, in my understanding, requires the ability to defer affective responses pending realistic assessments of a context’s relational potentials and choosing or acting according to the assessment. The infant, for example, has no free will in its response to signs it pairs. Nor do adults unable to mediate between their affective/drive states and their actions.

In sum, free will is an artifact of information processing, and to an extent, drawing parallels between information contexts and quanta is tempting. And I’m sure as a physicist with information processing interests, you’ve rightly seen “uncertainty” as a big dark shadow lurking behind all that I’ve written here. But I remember so well the metaphoric intoxications of Shannon and Weaver as they found parallels between the formula for calculating the amount of entropy in information and in the physical universe. I’ve taken the pledge. No more metaphor binges for me.