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12:40
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Q: Existence-monism and (hard) free will

Kristian Berry(Note: in the following, OTB = One True Being = whatever the one being is, that existence monism countenances.) As an example of an existence-monist paraphrase: "I'm sitting in a chair here" = "The OTB is arranged me-and-chair-wise here." Now, per Kant among others, I can't(!) be sure, and in fac...

@8Mad0Manc8 this isn't about who created the OTB, is it? But more, if there is an OTB, then is the appearance of conflict between non-OTB agents an illusion? Or is the OTB capable of self-conflict?
@8Mad0Manc8 I'm talking about existence monism. The funny word/phrase I'd seen before, for this, was "blobject," but here on this SE, I've spoken of a "One True Fact" before so I chose my present wording accordingly.
Could you elaborate on where/how you see these conflicts arising?
@Sammich I'll edit my question to apply the paraphrase stuff to your request.
@8Mad0Manc8 the purpose of comments is to help clarify the question. Your thought processes don't seem responsive to clarification, so I can't keep sorting through your comments, here.
@KristianBerry Thank you for clarifying. If I am interpreting you correctly, it seems you equate the OTBs "will" with how us humans express the concept of will. Do you mean that the free will of the OTB is manifest in us, and since we have conflicts, the conflicts are a part of the OTB, and your question arises from this? Really enjoyable idea if I am interpreting it correctly(?).
@Sammich yes, that's my specific question. And since my theory of free will seems to commit me to existence monism at least w.r.t. beings with free will (that's there's only one "true" blobjective agent) I have this critique of my theory at hand...
12:40
@KristianBerry Would the answer not depend on how you interpret human conflicts as genuine conflicts within the OTB? Do you see the conflict between a wilderbeest and a lion hunting it, as a critique, if not on the same level, at least on the same scale as a human-to-human conflict?
@Sammich I'm actually super into animal welfare/rights and stuff like that, so my estimate of the cognitive and moral abilities of animals is strong enough to support questioning whether predator/prey relations are also examples of possible conflict in the universal will of an OTB.
@KristianBerry This is great. I hold in many ways the opposite position of yours, in that I can agree to an "OTB", but I reject free will. Anyway, I think that you need to define how conflict arising in biological creatures on earth equates to conflicts for the OTB. Similarly to (but not equal to) how "God is good" and "Some people do evil" can be reconciled by proposing that we cannot understand "good" and "evil" in the way God does. I hope that makes sense, and that I haven't come of as rude in my comparison.
@Sammich the theistic comparison has def. come to my mind, so we're all good. And you've been considerate and have been using the comments for genuine clarification of the OP so we're double all good all the way across the sky :p
Stackexchange was guilt-tripping me to move it into a chat, so i did. We could also move it into discord or wherever if you want extended discussions since we are interestingly polar in our view of will, but seem quite equal in terms of morals.
I should note that my question can be understood as, "Are conflicts between local non-blobjective wills equivalent to conflicts internal to the global blobject's own 'will'?" so I wouldn't know, yet, how to define the local conflict otherwise so as to equate it to the global one. Or, again, I guess that's the main part of my question...
I think that if compatibilism is true, though, then the issue would not really arise. E.g. if we go with Frankfurt's mesh theory (or my hazy memory of it anyway), all the conflict would occur on a "low enough level" of the mesh so that by the time we zoomed out to the blobject's level, there'd be no actual opposition.
So compatibilism would be one way out. However, my reasoning for hard free will, here, doesn't leave enough room for compatibilism to rejoin my question directly, so I could still maintain my question as, "Does attributing hard free will to the OTB result in incoherent states per the OTB?" etc.
12:52
Do you define Hard Free Will for the OTB as "the OTB can do whatever it wants whenever it wants"?
As in, your definition of the OTB is a being that is wholly unaffected by its "internal process" if you will+
I'm not sure I have a stable-enough concept of hard free will (and/or the concept seems inherently unstable, maybe). I generally think of it in terms of pure, unqualified alternating possibilities, so in this case, the idea is (following Kant, mainly) that the physical world-as-a-whole is not determinate enough for the universe to evolve in one way, by necessity, vs. some other way. The universe interacts with its own "edges", so to say, and the indeterminacy of the edges turns into spontaneity
in cosmological evolution.
So for example, I assume that we can define individual possible worlds in terms of infinitary logics, which have specific parameters for "how long are their conjunctions/disjunctions" and "how much quantification do they have," and these are the parameters that change over time, but not predictably almost at all, at least sometimes.
I'll add this since I spent sometime formularting it: i'll try to clarify my confusion: If the OTB encapsulates the entire universe, it is either limited to this universe, or our universe is limited to it. If it is the prior, it would have to be able to defy its own nature to have free will. If it is the former, our universe's laws is governed by it, it acts entirely outside our understanding, and there cannot be incoherent states that we could define.
I guess I would assume that the universe doesn't have a specific nature, on that level, or so whatever nature it has evolves over time.
Hard free will is just the opposite of hard determinism. The latter has no room for free will, as the total state of the universe is defined by the previous state. While hard free will means that at any point the OTB could do whatever it wanted. So it could move Jupiter millions of miles in any direction, because it is not governed by the physical laws physicists are trying to interpret.
(Small sidenote, the spontaneity at the edge of the universe is a really good way of putting it. I saw a recent PhD dissertation that has calculated the energy of empty space and shown that the fluctuations necessarily creates particles)
In relation to your "pure unqualified alternating possibilities", this would seem like OTBs free will would be scalar? In that the further out from the middle we are, the more free will the OTB can express?
So everything that's established in our local sphere of the universe is determinate, both for us and naturally the OTB, but at the edges, it can alter its direction at will, as it is the only area where cosmological evolution is possible?
13:10
Yes, I think that's where my idea leads, for now anyway. Like, almost all of what I would say that the OTB could do would be to fiddle with its general parameters. How this would translate into hard free will on the local level is too obscure for me, though, and hearkens back to my confusion about Kant's compatibilism.
I don't think I am able to find an argument for hard free will in this, but a degree of control given to the OTB should be possible. It can maintain logical consistency, and is currently excluded from being provable in any other way than maths, since we are limited by our local sphere.
I am soon done at work, so I won't be back until monday, but if you want to further discuss this, or discuss why you believe free will holds at all, you can add sammich_maker in discord, and we can discuss there. Thank you for the conversation, I greatly enjoyed it.
You're welcome :) hopefully I get back to work soon too :p
This is way better than work tho! Here is the link to the rotating black hole dissertation that has the energy in empty space calculation if you're interested. It's less techincal then you'd think, and the guy has run simulations on the blackholes. It's highly fascinating: youtube.com/watch?v=o6K9fzOp020&;

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