Personality and Belief: Lent 2024, Day 27

Watching an interview with British theoretical physicist Christopher Isham yesterday, I was struck by his observation that how one interprets quantum mechanics boils down to whether one is an extrovert or an introvert. Here's the quote:

"There is some link between people's interpretation of quantum mechanics and their psychological type in a  Jungian sense. This is the distinction between introvert and extrovert; an extrovert being someone whose primary attention is outside and the introvert is someone whose primary attention is inside. I noticed that those physicists who are extrovert tend to favour the empirical pragmatic probability of measurements as being all that we can say about the world, whereas people like me who are strongly introvert favoured anything but that, and that was the reason they argued so much because they never could understand each other's point of view."

Wow. Now extrapolate this from interpretations of quantum mechanics to philosophy. Could there be a link between extroversion and materialism on the one hand, and introversion and a metaphysical perspective on the other? Put it another way; if you're an extrovert, are you less likely to believe in a supernatural divine power than an introvert?

I have written before about personality type in the sense of the panoply of behavioural disorders categorised by modern psychiatry. I believe that we all, to a lesser or greater degree, are on the spectrum of one or more of the main forms of disorder, however very few of us have these on a scale significant enough to merit diagnosis or clinical intervention. 

Examples of these disorders include depression, bipolar disorder, autism spectrum disorder, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, dyslexia, hoarding disorder, anorexia, bulimia, substance abuse, schizophrenia, narcissism, paranoia, to name the better-known ones. The percentage of the population clinically diagnosed with such conditions is low. However, diagnosed cases are but the tip of the iceberg, with the vast bulk of people demonstrating low-level symptoms in a way that isn't debilitating in their day-to-day functioning or social interactions but which nevertheless still manifest themselves enough to affect personality.

So – is the way we experience reality a product of our biology? If your personality is indeed shaped by manifestations of your behavioural traits, which themselves are thought to be genetic in origin – then do your genes shape the way you look at the world?

This is another aspect of the free-will/determinism debate. Is your worldview determined? 

I'd posit that there does exist a metaphysical will above that ego-driven material will, which seems increasingly to me to be determined by external factors (upbringing, environment and, yes, biology). The metaphysical will is intuitive; it functions by openness to the cosmic stream of consciousness, ethical in purpose, unfolding along with the Universe. Alignment with the Flow.

There is a clear correlation between spirituality and sense of purpose and meaning to life. People with that strong spiritual belief system do tend to be happier. Meaning brings hope; being trapped within materialism brings on hopelessness. The more you push back against the demands of your ego in favour of the calm voice of your consciousness, the happier you get.

More tomorrow.

Lent 2023, Day 27
Being Positive is more than just being Optimistic

Lent 2022: Day 27
God and Nationalism

Lent 2021: Day 27
Consciousness in other creatures

Lent 2020: Day 27
The Physical and the Metaphysical

Understanding the Esoteric: Lent 2024, Day 26

I had been planning to write a post or two about esotericism this morning, when I woke from a dream.

{{ I had devised a random number-veneration generator. A black cube made of lacquered hardwood, with sides of about 6cm, filled with machinery – brass cogs, spindles ratchets, springs, coils, escapement mechanisms what have you – and heavy in your hand. The machinery, intricate and precise, is sealed inside, with no way of physically accessing it. 

What is the number than shall be venerated today? It whirrs, it clicks, it calculates. And the result it gave me, transmitted directly into my mind, for Sunday the tenth of March was... 46.

Forty-six. This is the number. But why 46? What is its significance? Why should it be venerated on this of all days? I hurriedly add the two integers, four and six, to produce ten. Ten! Why, it is a One followed by a Zero! A regression, from Completeness to Nothing! The wrong direction! "A butterfly cannot become a caterpillar!" Or maybe just seemingly the wrong direction... How could...? }}

And in that instant, all became clear. The entire notion of esotericism is like this. Take a random notion or concept that can be interpreted in multiple ways, and bury it within an arcane structure of numerology, linguistics, mystical visions, obscure references and call it an secret key that unlocks a door to another layer on the path to the Ultimate Truth...

Seeking a universal spiritual dimension of reality, as opposed to the external ('exoteric') institutions and dogmas of established religions, esotericism draws on mystical beliefs and traditions harking back to the Gnosticism of the early days of Christianity, as well as the Kabbalah and Hermeticism. The esoteric tradition, continued through such secretive groups as the Rosicrucians, contends that there is hidden spiritual knowledge reserved for select initiates, hidden from the masses.

Allow me now to become controversial. I'd posit that the war waged by the Church Fathers against the Gnostics, and the secrets kept hidden with esotericism can be framed in the light of a struggle between neurotypical hierarchs and a network of the neurodiverse. 

For the leaders of the early Christian church, the Truth was not hidden. It was made manifest in the death and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, mankind's Lord and Saviour, who died on the Cross to redeem us sinners. Those who follow the Lord shall be rewarded by eternal life in the Kingdom of God. There it is! Nothing more to it than that. Everything in plain sight, simple, straightforward – follow the Lord. Without question.

But no! The Gnostics emphasised personal spiritual knowledge (gnosis) above the teachings and authority of religious institutions. They "held the principal element of salvation to be direct knowledge of the hidden divinity, attained via mystical or esoteric insight. Gnostic texts deal not in concepts of sin and repentance, but with illusion and enlightenment" [Wikipedia.] A hidden divinity to be accessed by esoteric insight, not prattled off once a week on Sunday.

The Church Fathers did not like this one bit and carried out a centuries-long fight against the Gnostics, branding them as heretics, destroying Gnostic texts and persecuting adherents of Gnosticism.

But what if Gnostics ("those who are oriented toward knowledge and understanding – or perception and learning – as a particular modality for living") were merely individuals who today would be diagnosed as being somewhere on the high-functioning end of autism disorder spectrum ('savant syndrome')? Symptoms include restricted interests, ritualistic behaviours, higher levels of perception skills and attention to detail.

If indeed this is the case, then the condition of being an early Gnostic would be genetic. Maybe the Gnostics exhibited biological markers, such as enlarged caudate-putamen structures in their basal ganglia, that caused them to process information differently to rank-and-file adherents of canonical Christianity? 

And now I slip into Dan Brown territory. Bloodlines! Descendants of the second-century Gnostics walk the earth today, seeking knowledge and understanding rather than pursuing material goals in life!

This brings me to a major thread from my Lenten blog posts from 2023, considering how one's approach to spirituality and religion may differ due to underlying neurological factors. More tomorrow.

Lent 2023, Day 26
The Ghost in the Machine

Lent 2022: Day 26
The End of Times

Lent 2021: Day 26
Physical Immortality

Lent 2020: Day 26
Intimations of Immortality

Dealing with Evil: Lent 2024, Day 25

On the one hand, there's Jesus's injunction to turn the other cheek. To love your enemy.

On the other hand, there's the Prisoner's Dilemma. And its empirically demonstrable solution: always cooperate with the other fellow until he does the dirty on you, then smack him back and keep on doing so until the moment he repents and returns to cooperation; at that moment, you do likewise and continue cooperating (until such times as he defects, then you return to counterstrike mode). 

Play the game a million times, and the optimal strategy turns out to be cooperate-cooperate, defect-defect, every time. Tit-for-tat, in other words. Continuing to cooperate, turning the other cheek while the other guy is smiting you repeatedly in the face, is a strategy for suckers. It only encourages wrong-doing (example: Obama and Merkel's response to Putin's invasion of Crimea in 2014).

The Prisoner's Dilemma model works well enough, but has two problems. The first is identifying what constitutes a defection. A colleague criticising your work at a meeting, or neighbours who habitually let their dog crap on your lawn – can either be classed as a transgression? The second problem is determining an appropriate and proportional response to what you judge to be a transgression. Start a vendetta against your colleague or neighbour?

In multinational diplomacy, judging where to draw the line as to the other party's egregious behaviour and choosing a proportional response is crucial. The quote, widely attributed to philosopher Edmund Burke, "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing", applies to individuals as much as to collectives such as nations or treaty partners. Not sending the correct signals when red lines are crossed marks you out as a soft touch.

Let's return to Jesus. Does He mean loving your enemy literally, even as your enemy is herding you into a gas chamber?

How should we deal metaphysically with a murderous tyrant across the border, whose behaviour threaten your country, your family and you? Pray for his speedy death? Pray for him to fall victim to a brain haemorrhage in his sleep?  Or surround the tyrant with compassionate thoughts aimed at persuading him to see the error of his way? Both, I feel, are doomed to failure, even if millions aim such intentions at him nightly.

What does work then? Letting go, metaphysically at least, and let the material world deal with its material problem in the material way? Maybe the metaphysical works at the personal level. One's ability to will one's own fate works to a certain, limited, extent, but projecting it on a larger scale, to will the eradication of, say, malaria, or evil people, probably doesn't. Why not? 

We seek the truth underlying reality. We seek it scientifically, in the material realm, we seek it esoterically in the metaphysical realm. The process of discovering the truth is an eternal process. We are not destined to find out now, in this space and time, in this life. A world devoid of evil, because people willed it thus, is beyond our grasp.

I wrote on Day 14 of Lent this year about entropy as a physical explanation of chaos, the opposite of emergent complexity. Things breaking down, people dying – entropy. Making things, people being born – emergence. Blessed are the builders, cursed are the killers. But there's always tit for tat and the Prisoner's Dilemma. Do not kill, but if someone starts killing you people, your family, you are obliged to hit back physically at the source of that evil, and keep doing so until it backs away and gives in. But proportional response is key, as is final forgiveness.

Where metaphysics breaks down against the rocks of reality. 

Lent 2023, Day 25
Intuition and Dreaming

Lent 2022: Day 25
Writing It All Down

Lent 2021: Day 25
Faith and Knowledge

Lent 2020: Day 25
Chances, complacency and gratitude

The Ego Alone – the Individual vs. the Collective (Pt IV): Lent 2024, Day 24

Thought-experiment time: imagine the most egotistic, narcissistic person you know, marooned on a desert island. Life's comfortable (food is plentiful, there's shelter, a warm climate, no predators), but there are no other human beings around, and escape is impossible. 

Imagine, say, a Trump, on his own, minus entourage, with no one to impress, or boss about or shout at. What would be going through his mind? How quickly would he implode psychologically? 

We see here the individual, the individualist – entirely focused on self – and yet emotionally dependent on the collective. Such a narcissistic ego requires the collective to provide non-stop positive feedback, the crowd acting as a mirror in which the ego can view its reflection. Without fawning flunkies, without the adulation of the masses, the ego's sense of being collapses. The individual ego, it turns out, is anything but independent. For such folk, isolation, loneliness, is the greatest fear. 

Although I'm sure I'd be unable to cope with the level of isolation on that island, I do appreciate the joy of solitude; not having any one around to bother me making demands. Over time, with age, my biology-linked ego has faded; I no longer seek the attention of or approval from others. A calm consciousness rises instead to replace it.

And yet despite my individualism, my deepest concerns are not for my own future, but for the Collective. I don't want a return to war, sparked by a tiny handful of egos. I don't want future humans to suffer from the effects of a changed climate, changed by a couple of generations' unthinking dash for material possessions.

So – seeking an afterlife that's essentially the same as this one, but with your ego residing in another plane is, according to me at least – is unlikely to occur. Seeking an afterlife with your ego residing in another body is even less probable (different body = different biology = different ego). But seeking an afterlife in which your consciousness, unshackled from your ego, survives in some form or another, well, that's a notion I'm open to, if only because this squares with my life-long experiences of anomalous qualia memories from another time, another place.

But how about if your afterlife were to take the form of a dilution of your individual, small-c consciousness into one, vast, cosmic, Big-C Consciousness? I have long posited this as the end-point of the unfolding Universe, its Purpose met, its destiny fulfilled. You are no longer either ego nor individual, subjective conscious experience, but the consciousness of everyone, everything that ever existed. You know all, there are no secrets, everything is clear – but you are now everything.

This squares with Buddhist and Hindu teachings; the 'I' subsumed into 'we'. A difficult concept for individualists to swallow – whether materialist individualists or even ones with a more spiritual outlook.

Lent 2023, Day 24
We are all Sentinelese? 

Lent 2022: Day 24
Memory, identity and reincarnation

Lent 2021: Day 24
Reconciling science and spirituality

Lent 2020: Day 24
Refutation (II)

The true Self – the Individual vs. the Collective (Pt III): Lent 2024, Day 23

We have all learned how to 'mask'; how to camouflage our true selves to blend in with the collective. Becoming a part of society, integrating, becoming accepted by our peers, is crucial to the years between adolescence and parenthood. 

At this stage in life, it's all about marking our place in the status hierarchy, with the aim of selecting an optimal mate for reproduction. Of course, this intent is carefully masked within society and hidden from the participants themselves (who don't really realise at the time why they are going to this party or that dance). 

We try to fit in. We learn what we can and what we cannot say; how sincere we can really be, and how we behave. What words and behaviours are interesting enough to get noticed and liked – and where to draw the line, how not to repel or outrage with what we say and do. Be an outlier, by all means, but not an outsider.

The ego is driven by biological imperatives in youth. This is not the time of life to search for the meaning of life. It is the time to integrate but also to make one's mark, and the ego helps here. Status symbols help here. As a teenager, having one's own income – a Saturday or holiday job – suggests that one is self-reliant and not just poncing off indulgent parents.

In the traditional 'sex-for-security' model, girls will favour young men who can demonstrate resourcefulness, reliability and emotional stability. So if you're not resourceful, unreliable and emotionally unstable, at least you have to pretend to be. It's what society, the collective, expects of you. It's what your biology expects too – survival of the fittest. Adapting to the environment, the social environment here being the collective. Survival of those who fit in best.

So buckle down, put on a brave face and get on with it.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the background, the consciousness is feeling, observing, experiencing, as it has done since earliest childhood. That's where the true Self is residing. The notion of masking your true self while promoting the ego, and your 'shell of foam', is extremely common behavioural trait by people – don't reveal your true self to others, in particular those who have yet to form a judgment. Create an image, pose. impose, impress. Play a role. 

The aim is to reach a level of material comfort, settle down, settle in, reproduce, bring up the children – and then what? Once everyone is adequately fed, clothed and housed, educated and, like Kahlil Gibran's arrows that have left the bow, it is time for the ego to withdraw; it has performed its biological duty.

You no longer have to flash that brave face. Now is the time for the true Self to come to the fore, to seek its destiny, to manifest its true potential. Heed the intuition's calling; listen to the inner voice. You no longer need to prove your worth to society in material ways as a productive consumer; it's now time to step off the materialist treadmill. Busting a gut at work to earn extra money to buy things you don't need to impress people? That's teenage stuff, really. Juvenile behaviour. Needed in young-adult years, but a mindset that's a millstone in middle age, holding you back from contentment and joy. Not for me is bucket-list travel, ticking off destinations so I can impress other by reeling off exotic places visited. Not for me shopping around for fine clothes or cars.

What, then?

The search for deeper meaning drives me on. Today, this has never been easier, with the works of scientists, philosophers, theologians, historians and sociologists accessible online. Curiosity is no longer restricted by limited access to libraries and bookshops. Forming an understanding of reality that matches that which your consciousness experience, that's my goal.

The first half of your life can indeed be driven by your biology and ego. But the second half should should have deeper purpose. And for the good of the Collective – and the environment – dial back the materialist impulse.

Lent 2023: Day 24
The Spirituality of Cosmic Life

Lent 2022: Day 23
Matter and materialism

Lent 2021: Day 23
Near-death experiences and the Afterlife

Lent 2020: Day 23
Refutation I

Ego vs Consciousness – the Individual vs. the Collective (Pt II): Lent 2024, Day 22

The ego, the consciousness – singular and plural. One ego, many egos. Many egos clash. (Clash is what egos tend to do!) But many consciousnesses? Or one consciousness? Ultimately, just the one eternal, Cosmic, consciousness? Egos sit at the heart of conflict. From wars between nation to which brand of breakfast cereal we'll buy this week. Consciousness, however, is calm and reflective, bearing no malice, meaning no harm. Observing, understanding, perceiving, rather than shrieking "Me! Me! Me!"

Our biologies make our egos as they are, shaped by evolution and circumstance; the ego has far less free will that our egos would imagine! Buffeted by forces of the material world, the ego is pushed and pulled into behaving as it behaves. But the consciousness remains still. It is a manifestation of the one Universal unity, poured into our biological body, and destined to part from it at biological death.

But were we One before death and will we be One after our bodies die?

And here I scratch my head, and admit that this isn't my own personal, subjective experience. It feels to me as though my consciousness has experienced life in human form before living this one. This I experience through flashbacks (anomalous qualia memories from another time and another place) and dreams (far rarer, far more specific narrations of actual events). Such dreams stand out as they are bereft of cognitive dissonance, the the Unities of time, place and action all fit. The flashbacks, however, are common and happen on average several times a week. They are more frequent with the turning of the seasons; they are more frequent in Jakubowizna than in Jeziorki, and they were more frequent in Jeziorki than in Perivale. They often come (maybe a third? Maybe a half?) in the form of flashbacks-through-flashbacks, where that sense of familiarity echoes through a memory of a moment in childhood during which I originally experienced such an anomalous flashback.

But is this universal? I doubt it! I have not met more than a tiny handful of people reporting a similar phenomenon. To square this, I need to reach for David Eagleman's possibilianism, and my own intuition that all who seek God shall find God in their own way.

This has gone on all my life, convincing me that there is something very real to the concept of reincarnation, though how it works (the vectors of consciousness) is completely beyond my understanding. It is the prime motivation behind my spiritual quest to make sense of it all, and very much informs my worldview.

In my case, I do not feel that I was with the One before birth (maybe briefly between lives). Logically, therefore, I do not expect to return to the One after death. Rather, an individual journey of growth in understanding and wisdom, growing like a snowball from one biological lifetime to the next. 

So: becoming part of the One – when does that occur? Right at the end of time, or incrementally, in stages? A slow blending together, A fusion of souls/consciousnesses over millennia? Past-life recollections from more and more people across future incarnations?

Or, following on from the concept of the block universe (eternalism) – if the reality of time is that everything that happens does so simultaneously, then are questions of what happened before we were born and after we die become irrelevant?

At this stage, many more questions than answers. However, the end-point is clear (for me at least!) – all in God, God in all. We (plural) are One (singular). Though how that happens, as we live our biologically separate lives, separate bags of living cells, experiencing life subjectively, individually, is currently beyond my grasp. I search on.

Here, another big think-you to my brother Marek for pointing me towards the works of Greek philosopher Plotinus, and the idea of duality of the One in two metaphysical states, which worked its way into Western esoteric philosophy. And another concept, that of 'lumpers' and 'splitters',  as used by physicist and philosophy writer Freeman Dyson who suggested that we can broadly, if over-simplistically, divide "observers of the philosophical scene" into splitters and lumpers - roughly corresponding to materialists (who imagine the world as divided into atoms) and Platonists (who regard the world as made up of ideas). I'd take this idea further – lumpers are generalists, whilst splitters are specialists.

More tomorrow!

Lent 2023, Day 23
God, Aliens and the Unfolding Universe

Lent 2022: Day 22
The Good Lord and the Environment

Lent 2021: Day 22
Muscle Memory, Mindfulness and Metaphysics

Lent 2020: Day 22
Repeatable Metaphysical Experiences

The individual vs the collective (Pt I): Lent 2024, Day 21

"We are all part of the continuous whole" – an insight that came to me many years ago while out walking on a sunny spring day in Jeziorki. Is consciousness an individual phenomenon, reality as we experience it subjectively by ourselves, to ourselves? Is this the only way we experience consciousness? Are our biological bodies vessels into which consciousness is poured, and then filtered through and flavoured by our egos? 

It certainly feels that way. There's the I, the pure consciousness, and the ego.

Let's separate the two. Consciousness – the simple act of being aware – is more than just the sum of our five senses acting upon our neurons at any one moment in time. The depth of our conscious experience is intensified by memory, by understanding, by longing, by feelings of satisfaction and anxiety, by aesthetic preference, by familiarity, by emotion.

This is not to negate ego. It has an evolutionary role to play in the earlier stages of our journey through life, in particular, socialisation (the third of seven). The ego is a suit-and-mask ensemble worn by the biological self. It helps with establishing our place in the status hierarchy (or ladder of authority); this plays a part in mating and natural selection. In other words, the ego is closely linked to our biology.

Only once material comfort has been achieved and the kids have left home (to quote the rabbi), our strictly biological duties carried out, can life truly begin. However, 85% of people, according to developmental psychologist Robert Kegan, are stuck at that third stage. Held back by their ego, the principal driver in their lives, they continue to scrabble for a higher position in the status hierarchy, wanting more material possessions, which signal to other human their relative place on the ladder. It is a treadmill that has nefarious side effects for society and for the environment. 

The ego should, with maturity, be relegated to lesser duties, while consciousness – driven by curiosity and a thirst for understanding – should come to the fore. 

I certainly feel that this is the case with me; I have a 'Dilligaf' attitude these days when it comes to projecting status or any desire to show off. Far more important is staying content, experiencing a positive balance of joy over sorrow, no money worries, because I've learnt to tell needs from wants, let those wants wither away. Key to this is establishing primacy of consciousness over the ego. 

Too many of us are still in jobs they don't like, earning money to buy things they don't need, to impress people they don't know. Once materially comfortable, all basic biological needs assured, it's better (and healthier) to step back, consume less, take it easier, and focus on making the most of your human potential. 

But isn't that an introspective and self-centred way of life? 

If consciousness pervades the universe, ultimately uniting the entire cosmos, where is the place for the individual? 

That's what I shall explore over the next days.

Lent 2023, Day 21
Intuition, Inspiration and Creativity

Lent 2022: Day 21
The perennial question - how much spirituality do we need?

Lent 2021: Day 21
Where is your soul from?

Lent 2020: Day 21
Finding a symbol for your religion

Do we have free will? (Pt IV) Lent 2024, Day 20

A work that was formative and influential in developing my thinking on science and spirituality was Stuart A. Kauffman's Humanity in a Creative Universe. A present from my brother, it served as the basis of my series of Lenten blog posts for 2018. 

Kauffman's central idea is that the rejection of Newtonian certainties and their replacement with quantum possibilities has allowed magic back into our lives. Mechanistic physics, in which everything is determined by laws of motion and thermodynamics, is good at explaining reality at the meso-level that we perceive; but what goes on at the micro- and macro-levels of the sub-atomic and pan-galactic is not to be explained in Newtonian terms. 

Fundamental to the Newtonian paradigm is the notion that the possibilities constituting reality are always definable and therefore fixed ahead of time. Yet we now know that at the sub-atomic level, the notion of particles/waves existing in superposition (exemplified by Schrodinger's cat, alive and dead at the same time until a conscious observer looks) breaks down that paradigm. Instead, we have, as Kauffman calls them, 'possibles' and 'actuals'. When a particle is in superposition, it is a 'possible'. Only after we have measured it, witnessing the collapse of the wave function, does the 'possible' becomes an 'actual'. Zero and one becomes either zero or one.

Without the presence of the conscious observer, the particle remains in superposition, and we just don't know what the outcome will be. And here I'll briefly jump back to the 18th century, and the Anglo-Irish philosopher, Bishop Berkeley, who argued against Newton back in the day. Two hundred years before the birth of quantum mechanics, Bishop Berkeley stated that a conscious observer was necessary to observe the Universe – in effect the mind of God was needed to hear the sound of a tree falling in the forest if no one was there. Consciousness is essential for the existence of matter. There was no scientific evidence to back up this line of argument, no experiments with a photon gun or a Geiger counter, only intuition. Yet our understanding of the subatomic realm today suggests that Bishop Berkeley's subjective idealism may indeed be an accurate description of reality.

The key question within this new paradigm is the extent to which we can will possibles to become actuals. Kauffman has recently written a paper with Dean Radin (he that sceptics love to scorn), entitled Is the Brain-Mind Quantum? A Theoretical Proposal with Supporting Evidence. The paper's long list of scientific citations includes an article by Etzel Cardeña which I wrote about last year, a peer-reviewed study of psychic abilities, The experimental evidence for parapsychological phenomena: A review, published in 2018. As with Prof Cardeña's article, Kauffman and Radin are clear about the results – the effect is weak, but it's clearly there, above chance, experimentally demonstrable and not random. Whilst Prof Cardeña says that something's going on, but we don't know what it is, Kauffman and Radin attribute it to quantum effects within the mind.

They conclude: "Today, with growing evidence for quantum biological effects, the plausibility that some aspects of brain function are quantum is increasing... it is time to take the evidence for quantum mind, and thus psi, more seriously." The paper examines experiments in which participants try to alter the outcome of a randomly generated event, by willing it to happen. Here's the discussion:

For the first time since Newton, psi experiments in general and psychokinetic studies in particular could scientifically allow for a “responsible free will.” In these experiments, participants “try” to alter the probability of truly random events, or to alter the fringes in an optical interference pattern. “Try” is another word for “Will”. In our normal lives, we believe that we convert intended Possibles to Actuals all the time by choosing and doing, where counterfactually we could have chosen and done otherwise.

The core question is this: Can such a free will be responsible? In Quantum Mechanics, the outcome of measurement is ontologically indeterminate, breaking the causal closure of classical physics.

If the psychokinetic studies are valid, then a human can not only “try” to alter the outcome of a physical system by intentionally altering the probabilities of the outcomes of measurement, but their will can actually accomplish their desire. Thus, Mind trying and doing can alter the outcome of “actualization” to behave non-randomly. A responsible free will is not ruled out. The proposal that mind mediates actualization of potentials contains a deep difficulty: Before, e.g, human minds, measurements nevertheless occurred. How? One answer is a form of panpsychism where interacting quantum variables measure one another. This view of Quantum Mechanics is consistent with the Strong Free Will Theorem that says that electrons “freely decide” to become Up or Down upon measurement.

Wow. I think Bishop Berkeley, were he around today, could hold such a view quite freely. 

I have written before about the possibility of the human body being a receiver of universal consciousness; but can it also serve as a transmitter? A transmitter of consciousness with the power to alter future outcomes? If so, it is extremely weak, though demonstrably present. But present in everyone? I doubt it. Something that we can strengthen through exercise? Possibly. 

So – summarising my own thinking on free will; we have far less material free will than we'd like to think we have. It is the world that pushes us around, not us that push the world around. But I do believe that there's a deeper free will, at the metaphysical level, where what we will can be made manifest, although this must align itself with the Cosmic Purpose (i.e., there's an ethical dimension to this).

God the Father (the Past – what has happened). God the Son (the Present – what is happening, current environmental factors); God the Holy Spirit (the Future – willing positive outcomes).

Underpinning all this is gratitude; it is the energy source that powers your will.

"If you will it Dude, it is no dream" (Leb. 7:19)

Lent 2023, Day 20
Practical uses of intuition

Lent 2022: Day 20
Free will, consciousness and determinism

Lent 2021: Day 20
No, but who are you really?

Lent 2020: Day 20
Applying Occam's Razor to your religion