…
…so. Time, awareness, consciousness and free will. Jazz.
A marvel of a person recently put up a post on social media along with a couple links to brief videos regarding free will. (One of the links shows a video of Harrari. Still wonder a bit why he, the rather… fulfilling person, listens apparently frequently to that little unlikeab-ly shallow, well, hyper-sponsored and fundamentally racist creepy Israeli historian. Something of… posture, maybe, of… a physical gentleness and direct language - grammatical and corporal - which subtly contrasts many of the… often harmful ideas actually leaving Harrari’s delicately formed semitic mouth.) Anyway… the notion overall of his post and the links attached is to try and… preclude somehow the growing adhesion to the notion, increasing in popularity among … likely most academics in relevant fields, (he refers to Sepolsky,) of the absence of free will in the universe.
In the ensuing comment dialog others chime in from their own various theories and experiences, from computer programmers to a CERN astrophysicist. They and the exchange rather quickly move into, as if more fundamental than the original query about free will, what constitutes consciousness - not merely what it might be but actually is or how it evolved and evolves. Definition. Certainty. (Beware of that, I think. Certainty of the absolute sort. Which more than very resembles, is, a form of fanaticism. ‘Sieg heil…’ They touch on that as well, certainty that is.) From a little distance I’m chiming in here as well. Call it a choice so as to avoid the notion of free will yes/ free will no. So…. I’ll start with Jazz, sort of.
Or a story regarding the same, in part. I’m in New York time ago, let me fiddle with verb tenses, at the Blue Note, one of the tables nearer the stage. I’m with a friend and my partner as the set begins. Gato Barbieri, an Argentinian sax, ‘el gato’, is the headline, a sentimental favorite of both my latin american friend and mine. The rest of the band slops on stage and starts in…. We then hear El Gato’s sax coming from below us in back, actually from the door-stair next to me. The sax grows louder, fading in, as his figure, Barbieri, steps out from the opening while playing. And then… he falls down, right in front of me. I stand and lean over to help him up. He looks at me, somewhat empty-eyed, and exhales. I will remain drunk for the rest of the month on just the fumes in his breath. The concert went fine… El Gato was great, genuinely, for the whole set - despite remaining mostly unable to stand.
A few days after, I called an uncle, an old friend of Gato’s, to mention the concert- including the incident. ‘It’s better that way,’ he said. ‘If he’s sober he can’t play.’ That happens quite a bit, the alcohol thing before concerts, with … many, even most at least that I’ve met, of musicians playing atonic music. Drug use as well of course but the alcohol un-inhibiting of top-down Gaba inhibiting network influence. Most of the … ‘better’. But not all.
A thing about El Gato or, say, Chet, or… Bireli, others… tendentially they… have or had a way of speaking, of giving-expressing. I mean, most or at least much of the time in their concerts. Predictably. I wouldn’t expect, say….… Brad Mehldau let alone a …Pat Methany to need to get drunk in order to—’reach’ a place on command, usually around 10:15pm or say in this club or that theater in that city next Tuesday, last Friday, tickets on sale now. The former, Mehldau,… reaches in as a sort of dance to those places bringing them out in a sort of momentary orgasmic dive into the sublime. The later… simply never goes there. Which often, probably, makes performing honestly much easier.
Alcohol-sensitive GABA receptors and alcohol antagonists
Anyway. What might that story above have to do with choice or consciousness? Well… quite a bit, really, and maybe whoever is reading this gets that in ways that I both see and don't see. (Who is hearing the music? What does it mean? What is it saying? Who is playing the music? What do they want to give? In the moment I’m hearing it or more when it starts talking into me… what system or systems is or are expressing a consciousness? Choice….)
In order to give a feeling, that feeling, that synchrony or synchronized expression El Gato really did have to… undo some of the inhibitory expressions mostly neurological within him, mostly in his brain. Same Gato or different Gato? The line between choice vs pre-determination is… irrelevant, really, for externally what most of us would call or have called on that evening ‘El Gato’, Gato Barbieri.
And then… context. Intent. Wasn’t the music itself, the meta-language of different levels of synchrony, determining what both Gato and I would have done, at least in part? Did the music itself choose or predetermine or…address, funnel our choices, then at that moment on that eve? I think it’s less banal than it might at first seem. One does have to at least try to define what systems are or were expressing consciousness at what moment and then distinguish if affective choices were made by each, present and not. That makes the whole deal terribly complex. (And in a fundamental way tosses time mostly out the window, as it were. And verbal tenses except for those reinforcing a story.)
And inevitably uncertain. I’m writing this note as something similar to a story or story-ish - the form we use to contain and transmit and integrate information and limit complexity. Even if stories don't actually exist. But we don’t listen to topologies, tend to limit expressed information’s stickiness within mostly socially relevant boxes. In truth, as an example, I don't actually recall if the dressing room door to my right in front actually led to a stairway down or not (at The Blue Note, then.) And don't even recall if my partner was with me or not. But I chose to present it as such for it was determined then, by me, to be unimportant regarding the intent of the story I’m using,of the systems I’m trying to synchronize with in any reader or in one or more imagined readers. Or in case it doesn't jump out, the notion: what system is doing the choosing? And from when? Which implies: which consciousness?
We have a deal, mostly anthropomorphic not to say systemically homo sapiens-istic., about consciousness, tying it of late to increased complexity (and time or emergent time as a measure of the same.) Ie, Tononi’s… call it C>1 of integrated information. Or the whole consciousness integrates more info than all the parts. That seems to me terribly counter-intuitive (see the post on Chalmers: ...on consciousness and Chalmers)
C<1 (n-1) simply makes more sense, for me of course. Any single systemic expression is singular, always, I think quite. And that for complex systems, living systems or systems with agency. One at a time hierarchy.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hmm. I had a few notes on this, the two videos put up but I also made myself a sort of promise: that this note would not exceed 2 pages- while here I’ve just begun the 3rd. I suppose then I’ll simply sum up: All systems express to remain and those which include more than 3 temporally connected expressions inevitably develop motivation that in turn steers or informs or influences behavior. Meanwhile, fear - which, like remaining, is carried by systems across topological change - delineates systemic affect - where a system will not go. Identifying which system,as it were, is deciding remains very tricky. But we can say that as humans… we do tell (and decide, choose which of )our own stories to tell ourselves. Each one, story, includes a host of decisions. free will, to write. (see McGhilchrist) It’s within that space between carried fear (of entropy) and needing to remain (which implies a ton of increasingly complex and complicated processes) free will is exercised. Whether consciousness instead, similar but not the same set as free will or choice, is fundamental might be a more interesting and useful question.
Comments
Post a Comment