Grandpa Says: You Have Free Will, so Use it Well by Thomas G.

Parsons We are this and we do that, because our structure includes Free Will from the start. We generate ourselves by the recursive travel of excitations through our hierarchy of interwoven neural networks, especially in the brain. 1. Our big brain is nothing if not a decision-making organ. Such a costly organ could never have evolved if it did not pay off in the Darwinian game. Ask any mother about getting that head out! Look up how much energy it uses, even at rest. And even that brain, so large at birth, needs years of programming before it can provide as much survival help as any birdbrain is hatched with. Something very important must be happening in that brain: not just the very effective responses to common situations that are already built into the brains of reptiles, fish and birds at hatching, but the ability to select from among many life choices. 2. Free will is produced by the interaction of excitations with the neural networks that define us, as the NNs are altered by each passage of the recursively circulating excitations. This self-generation is nonlinear, producing sensitive dependence on initial conditions complicated by the lifelong addition of new inputs. Within limits, we can choose those inputs and choose how we respond to them, which affects the next input that we get, etc. 3. Exciton networks must settle into semi-stable patterns on strange attractors, vast numbers of which continually interact to produce the higher-order complex pattern that uniquely is the essence of each of us. 4. We evolved through stages, and retained our history as always-functioning components. Thus we have a lizard brain, etc. Similarly for our behavior and the urges that drive it. 5. We retain the essentially simple [grab resources and reproduce] to the max imperative of every living thing, but modified by our physiology and the brain that integrates and creates narratives from its sensory input and chemical responses. 6. As mammals, our brains get their earliest programming while we are helpless and totally dependent on those much larger mammals, our parents, to deal with our discomforts and provide the essentials of life. Thus at the most basic level we all learned (i.e. created and stored programs that assume) that it is vital to please the Big Entities in order to be fed, etc. This programming happened significantly before language acquisition, and even before we could well distinguish the outside world from ourselves, much less understand its parts and how they interact. So the programs are written in the language of emotions, needs, feelings and physiological responses, rather than words, logic, or even images. This, together with their privileged position as foundational programming, makes them very difficult to access with a conscious mind that is structured by language and imagery, much less to debug where they were flawed from the start (or even if perfectly coded initially, are no longer appropriate). 7. This is why no amount of rational, verbal analysis suffices to deal with this low-level programming, no matter how troublesome it is. The conscious mind can access it by observing emotional states and bodily responses and noticing patterns, but words and concepts are only peripherally useful. Emotions just as real and dominant as an infant's are the only tools that can alter this lowest-level programming, just above the BIOS. 8. Since this low-level programming was learned as a matter of life-or-death at the earliest age, it receives the highest priority and is protected from inspection and modification by the most serious warnings: Don't deviate from these instructions, Don't alter these instructions, Deadly Danger! This program worked and kept you alive, so don't change a thing about it or you risk death. These programs are quite similar in function to the hidden parts of the operating system on a computer. Windows doesn't want you to even *see* those vital system

programs, since any change you might make is likely to damage or destroy the system. If you insist on looking at them (show hidden files and folders), it will let you, but only with warnings not to modify them, on pain of system malfunction (do this and die, fool), and in many cases it will outright refuse to let you delete or modify them. Compare this to the emotional warnings you get when you ponder basic attitudes or try to change the habits you learned before your language and logic were available. Compare this to the difficulty of changing those old behaviors/emotions. Hey, this stuff worked to keep you alive even when you were helpless, so why take a chance on changing a winner now? 9. Crying was one of the tactics used in those first days and months of life, whenever some discomfort required adult intervention. So naturally that same behavior is called up when we feel helpless and in need later on. All this in service of individual survival. 10. But later in life it became important to function in a group, both as a useful member who actually contributed to group competitiveness and as a member with the highest possible rank, to improve mating chances. So we acquired programming to achieve this, and this included altruism and the Golden Rule, both vital modifiers of basic animal behavior that are essential for the optimum functioning of the social groups without which our ancestors could not have competed with other tribes. 11. But between tribes, warfare was the rule, so an entirely different set of values was appropriate, leading to the perennial state of war we see thoroughout history, including frequent genocide. 12. These contradictory sets of values created problems in the brain for at least two reasons. First, the brain is designed to simplify imagery and models, both because Occam's Razor is a good guide to truth and because from the lowest neuronal levels on up the brain favors simpler patterns as less expensive in terms of energy and other computational resources. Also, a tribal pattern of meta-organization of thought and attitude grew up that helped unity and fighting effectiveness: religion, always involving a creation myth that placed its people in the center of the Creator's caring attention. This was a very effective grafting of an adult authority structure using symbols and words onto the infant mindset, and gained much power by adopting the Big Parent idea as its originator and enforcer. The Big Parent who made everything, knew everything, in fact was all-powerful in the eyes of the infant. This allowed codes of conduct to be enforced that unified the tribe and made it a better fighting force. 13. But complexity and contradictions were unavoidable because different codes of conduct were required for fellow tribesmen and for outsiders, so one set of principles always had to clash with another. 14. But we and our societies evolved for many many generations with these contradictory sets of imperatives all vital to our survival. 15. So we are all burdened with a mental/emotional structure that embodies infelicities and contradictions. First a layer of infantile, preverbal programming, the best that could be crafted at that stage of life, then layers of behavioral and attitude conditioning built on that base, but with totally contradictory structures. One set of attitudes and rules guides us in intra-group competition, urging selfish maximizing of status and mating, but also requiring that at least a facade of adherence to be nice rules is maintained, and a that genuine altruism be practiced (especially when it benefits the entire group more than it costs oneself). Plus a much more ruthless set of rules that determines behavior and attitudes towards other groups and their members. Love your group, hate the other. 16. These evolved responses give us strong tendencies to form groups, and then to create intergroup conflict over resources, status, or nothing at all (Swift, big-endians), to ensure that the groups fight it out and the group with the best set of rules wins. 17. And here we are, still crazy after all these years. 18. The whole world is composed of interlocking processes. If they weren't interlocking, they wouldn't affect us (by interlocking with our own processes) and wouldn't even be

perceptible. If they were static 'things' rather than processes, they would be more stable and unchanging than any real thing I can think of. What we call 'things' are just the observable and easily named parts of very slow processes. Notice how wind and sea and rocky shore are all treated as things in thought and language, despite their manifest differences. Yet they all change constantly, though on different timescales. 19. The more these processes interlock so that their changes and effects affect each other, and can then after some chain of interactions complete the circle to affect themselves, i.e. the more self-interaction there is, the likelier it is that a complex of processes will become organized in such a way as to keep itself going. We can call this self-organization and think about it anthropocentrically, but this happens not because the resulting 'entity' wanted to come into existence or to remain in existence, but just because it can happen that way, and in the course of enough time it will be formed into that self-sustaining structure and (by definition) retain it through time. A simple example is a thunderstorm, in which a variety of micro-meteorological events that amount to no more than high school physics at work (gas laws, thermodynamics, potential & kinetic energy) become organized in such a way as to produce entirely new phenomena as dramatic as lightning and thunder, hail and tornadoes. 20. The atmosphere itself is an excellent example of a self-organizing and self-maintaining system. Its physical components are largely confined by gravity to a shallow region quite near the solid and liquid of the Earth's surface. It receives a flow of inputs from above, such as sunlight, and from below, such as evaporated water, plus some pushing (via ground friction), but many of its most important interactions are with itself, corralled in its small hollow sphere. Every change that occurs in any part of it affects all other parts, forming multiple feedback loops. As Lorenz discovered and proved, this creates the kind of complexity that always comes from nonlinear feedback, i.e. deterministic chaos with strong attractors and stable basins of attraction, and sensitive dependence on initial conditions. If the atmosphere had the mechanism that we do for formulating and implementing desires, it would be alive rather than just an exquisitely stable self-regulator that has fallen into a stable state that tends to maintain itself globally even as it changes locally. 21. We humans are the premier example (that we know of) of a self-organizing phenomenon that persists through time. In our case, this is partly because we want to. Because the ability to want and to act on wants is another feature that can evolve just like eyes and wings can, and it is singularly effective in prolonging existence. All very explainable, right down to the mechanisms. 22. There's nothing wrong with the math of thermodynamics, but our verbal interpretation of the second law has led us into damaging misconceptions. The classic verbal statement is that Entropy (which is a measure of the disorder of a system) always tends to increase in any closed system. The problem is that order and disorder were formulated in terms of the kind of geometrical, rule-following order of a crystal, versus the absence of that kind of order. The orderliness of a developing embryo or blooming flower was never considered, since these were not describable by a few simple linear rules. Claude Shannon used the word to describe a state of information content (a far cleaner variable than 'disorder'), and in his calculations and examples a meaningful message recorded with minimum redundancy was indistinguishable from a random collection of symbols, thus resembling ultimate disorder, unless one had the key to decode it. From that standpoint, we living beings, and especially we who are intelligent, educated and experienced, are extremely disorderly, since we are complex mixtures rather than pure substances, and we have very little about us that is orderly in the crystalline sense, unless perhaps we have the misfortune to have a kidney stone. But although we represent a vast amount of information, quite well organized, we normally spend many years becoming even more information-rich rather than experiencing a spontaneous disordering of our minds and bodies. Only after a surprising duration of stability and even increase in orderliness do progressive systemic breakdowns lead to the failure of our organization and thus to death and ultimate disassembly. Our strange ability to

produce order in a universe that seems hostile to orderliness makes perfectly good sense thermodynamically, of course. The Sun produces vast amounts of energy in a relatively small volume of space, and this is the kind of organization that the universe works to eliminate by spreading the concentrated energy over the largest volume possible in the least time possible. We stand on our little planet blocking some of this energy from escaping, and we basically make a deal, allowing the energy to proceed into outer space as long as it pays a toll by increasing the organization available for living things here on Earth. This compromise follows all the laws, as best we can calculate them, but it appears to be allowing the creation of a type and quantity of organization that the equations do not deal with: intelligence and memory. How such deals are crafted in the first place is rather mysterious also. Ilya Prigogine and Stengers, in Order out of Chaos, discuss at length how far-fromequilibrium situations generate complex behavior and structures that actually help the whole system to reach equilibrium better than it could without them. As one of those complex structures, I am curious about this process, and this special case of the second law.