Friday, August 16, 2013

Feedback patterns: order from chaos leaves no room for free will

Last night Mike and I watched a good documentary called The Secret Life of Chaos which described how natural patterns occur (like leopard skin) seemingly spontaneously when cells in a system are able to feedback information to each other. (It'll make more sense when you see the documentary).

The amazing thing is the cell in a system can be represented in a much larger way: a bird in a flock, a horse in a herd, even a star in a galaxy. The natural pattern (the order) forms in a completely unpredictable manner each time (the chaos) and this is true for all humans too. We are just a playing out of the natural pattern from chaos.

Every cell in our body is a part of the pattern and each individual human (me, you) are all part of the pattern of humanity. It looks more and more likely that when the initial conditions of the universe were set in motion, the evolution of life and our species was just one outcome among trillions of possible outcomes.

If we are merely cells forming patterns via a feedback loop, I guess the big question is, who are we feeding our information back to? The collective human species? Something else? Maybe Bill Hicks was right all those years ago and "we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively".

Whatever the case, it is more evidence that we have no free will, after all, our cells are just self-organising themselves, so isn't it the same for our thoughts? Our choices?

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