The
title of this site comes from the following passage, as it
struck me as an interesting concept as well as a colourful
phrase when I came across it.
"The
techniques of autostimulation are extremely various.
Just as one can notice that stroking oneself in a certain way
can produce certain only partially and indirectly controllable
but definitely desirable effects (and one can then devote some
time and ingenuity to developing and exploring the techniques
for producing those desirable effects in oneself), so one can
also come to recognize that talking to oneself, making
pictures for oneself, singing to oneself, and so forth, are
practices that often have desirable effects. Some people
are better at these activities than others. Cognitive
autostimulation is an acquired and intimately personal
technique, with many different styles."
--Daniel
C. Dennett, Elbow Room
This
site doesn't have many visitors at the moment, but that will
hardly affect the content or frequency of posts herein.
I hope that doesn't bother you ... like it matters.
You may follow this link to add your own comment, but this is
what another "visitor" had to say
I
have been webmastering my own sites for several years now. (You
could say I've been the master of my own domain.) My
original home site entitled The
World Bri'ed Web is now in its seventh incarnation or
so. I write and record music, and use the site incessantly to
pitch the albums to all few of my visitors. I now invite you
to read my thoughts, rants, tidbits, musings, and brain-rains.*
May your stay be full of fruit.
*Brain-rain:
(n) Not as severe as a brain-storm, and hardly as vulgar as a
brain-fart, but somewhere safely in between.
August 23, 2004 Physiological Causality, Part One
If I were to summarize what I mean by the seemingly intimidating phrase "physiological causality," I would best do it thusly: it is the antithesis of free will. See, that was easy.
Now I need to clarify, refine, detail, and ornament. But first I must provide some discourse on the nature of why the heck I feel it necessary to tell this story. Over the course of many months, I've been trying my best to think about what "free will" actually is, and only then be able to work on its existence or lack thereof. When I'm all by myself at my little job, I have hours to autostimulate. (If you have disturbing thoughts at the moment, you've missed the point of why I selected the title of this whole page.) Unfortunately, the being-by-myself continues long after I have worked out any interesting trains of thought. The trains then depart to destinations after my stop. The basis for this site was to offer me a chance to just talk and talk, divulging the meanderings over which I had mulled. Now the particular thoughts on free will have been developing excessively, but no one I socialize with will agree with me. This is my shortcoming, theirs, or ours; but I find I need to further develop my lines of thinking as well as my means of communicating them. Only then will my peers agree with me.
Or what's actually more likely: they'll appear to follow and understand every last allegorical example (I've done MY job!) and they still will not agree with me (which, surely, is them not doing THEIR job, by faking the understanding, or by being pig-headedly intentional in their stubborn refusal to come to grips with the clear and sensical reality I've painstakingly laid before them!). Some people!
The short of it is, I tell the story to get my own thoughts in line so that not only can I understand better what I got myself into, but so that all you viewers can follow me, nod along, pity me, roll your eyes, click BACK, and forget you ever tried pronouncing that long A-word in the title.
Physiological causality is not the same as determinism, and it is not the same because I defined the darned term for myself as an alternative to determinism in the first place. When I was asked a while back to come up with a SHORT phrase/description for what I mean by my whole "there is no free will, why not, because it's not necessary to explain anything" thing, that was the term I coined after a little deliberation. I suppose I jumped ahead a bit quickly with that last quoted referent. Here I will begin my actual discussion.
Free will is a mystical concept used to describe phenomena, that a being has a bevy of choices, chooses amongst them, and acts out the path. However, simply the observation of the path acting is not sufficient, as many things can describe what happened. By starting around the area of free will not being necessary did I start to question its even existence.
I have biases, of course. Some I will explain and others I will seem to gloss over. The ones I gloss over will be glossed over because they're, quite frankly, BIASES: inherent positions one takes as true premises. I will try my best to legitimize all my premises, but I'm sure there are some assumed starting points I'll take that you will mentally stop me on and refuse to follow me further. I'll accept that. After all, this is an essay and not a dialog. Feel free to e-mail me to tell me off ... tell it to thatbrickwall@overthere.com.
My biases (assumed premises) include the following: 1) there exists a physical world, 2) the physical world is extraordinarily complex. In fact, the complexity of sheer PHYSICAL matter is so complex that the implimentation of a "mystical" or "spiritual" layer to overlay, color, flavor (whatever word you prefer) the physical one is superfluous, unnecessary, useless, and admittedly redundant. I believe that all observable phenomena (from a human agent observer, since that's as far out of the system we've got!) can be accounted for physically.
For free will to work, it needs a metaphysical medium. Free will is the automatic implimentation of a higher order, a spiritual plane, an alternate dimension, a soul, a supernatural ether, etc. And none of these things exist. Gee, now that was blunt (and, in arguable places, not even accurate). I'm going to need to backtrack just a bit, to better approach this thing. It's difficult to reconstruct my OWN thoughts on the path, let alone trying to lure you the same way.
("Hey, folks, I think I remember the way to this unknown city. I think it exists. I have no map since I didn't write one down the last time I got lost, but now I have all you people following me. What? No, I didn't see that bunch of trees last time ... but that's irrelevant, since the 'general' area of the jungle looks ... vaguely similar ...")
I will conclude this horrid introduction with a deft parry. How did I even have these thoughts or decide to write an essay on the non-existence of free will WITHOUT FREE WILL?, you may ask. Well, it requires a whole slew of definition clarifications (for instance, what the definition of "is" is) on the pronoun "I", the verb "to decide", and many, many others! (And don't give me any of that "Oh, you KNOW what I mean by "decide!" stuff ... that's just the thing, I DO know, but you won't understand my answer with such muddy context.) Depending on definitions, my answers could be either of the following, since I believe all of them to be equally true: 1) "I" don't exist, so OF COURSE "I" didn't have any thoughts, 2) Well, I followed the only inevitable "decision" possible, yet there's a byproduct sitting in my consciousness fooling me into labeling what just happened as a "choice", 3) Hey, no OTHER person had the thoughts for me; after all there IS still a system of accountability. You don't need free will to validate accountability!, 4) Just mind your own business already; you haven't even heard my little robot bug story!
12:00 AM August 22, 2004 IN PASSING
Chess analogies are about as overused as the King's Defense opening. But then, there's a reason for it ... it's effective!
Trust me, more posts are coming. This little bit isn't meant to imply I'm going to start talking about chess, though. I've been having some ideas. The trouble is, whenever I get the notion to post something, it will either turn out to be two lines of attempted wit, or 1000 words of essay. I suppose I shouldn't let that stop me from posting altogether, because what you (the viewer) get is just a dearth of posts; and the very few that do make it are just self-analytical meta-posts that bore the living recursion out of everyone. So, I'll try not to do that. Instead I'll prepare to talk about things that Everyone will be interested in: Physiological Causality!
And I've been reading up on quantum, so look out! 8:25 PM
I
have been webmastering my own sites for several years now. (You
could say I've been the master of my own domain.) My
original home site entitled 
August 23, 2004