Born to do Math 122 – Will and Willpower: Confirmatory Will
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/06/01
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Yes, so, we’ve been talking off-tape about will and willpower.
Rick Rosner: We don’t have to go to straight to IC with this stuff because this is a lot of stuff just being worked on in neuroscience or the hottest term for doing a direct physical observation of the brain and conscious processes.
IC intersects with the stuff. But generally when we talk about this stuff, there is agreement. For our purposes, and I think the brain people would agree to the extent that they agree at all, “will” can be used to refer to consciously mandated decisions.
That is, that you think about something consciously. You decide on a course of action.
Jacobsen: Is this the only formulation of it? Is there another logical progression to call something still will? You think about something. You decide.
Rosner: We can talk about will before information theory. Information theory didn’t start until 1948.
Jacobsen: That’s a good point. There was no formal definition of information in a mathematical framework before.
Rosner: No, then Clause Shannon developed the theory at Bell Labs.
Jacobsen: Also, Norbert Weiner helped with the probability theory development. I have a copy of the work by Shannon.
Rosner: Before that, 18th and 19th century, it was kind of the feeling, I believe, based on not much knowledge of a soul or a spirit juice existent in some semi-independent realm that decided things, “I am going to do this.” The “this” was an expression of self.
The self was somewhat connected to soul. It was connected to the mind, which was this thing that was not necessarily part of the material world. It was operating on the material world and you, as a material being.
It was the puppeteer operating your part of the material world from a different realm or using different stuff. Over the next couple of hundred years, as science and math became more able to explain how the material world can operate itself, how the brain can make the mind, and how everything can work entirely materially without having to resort to some other realm or some magic, it isn’t to say that there isn’t another framework, as IC postulates that there is an optimal mathematical representation of mind that can be graphed or mapped in its own dimension.
That map or dimension can be tied to the brain. But in terms of describing consciousness and the rules of consciousness, you’re, at least, picturing another dimension. It doesn’t mean necessarily another dimension. It means a dimension in which your mind works. I haven’t been made to make this distinction before. It is not some extra juice.
It is a consequence of information in a massive self-consistent information processing system.
Jacobsen: That brings two things to mind. On the one hand, you have thought about something, say two options come forward. Of those two options, someone selects one and wills towards it, to actualize it in the world.
The other isn’t really picking any choice. There isn’t anything conscious. They are simply acting on it. It is a one-channel path of acting in the world.
Rosner: According to modern brain science, those things aren’t that dissimilar.
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