In philosophy, psychology, communications, biology, and arguably every academic field, there is a point where students are asked to posit the notion of free will. Most would argue that we have free will, but several psychology based and metaphysically based ideologies would argue otherwise - free will is an illusion, they say.
For the most part, I've never really given this argument any thought. Even after positing the existence of the soul through Academic Earth's presentation of a Yale philosophy seminar, the approach to support deterministic views of existence always came off as facetious to me. We must have free will, I thought, there are just no two ways around that. Until I was in the library today, typing in a media viewing room - I attempted to be as quiet as possible.
Here's a thought exercise and a meditation exercise to ponder: If you think you have complete control over your every action, try to do any mundane task in completion without making a single noise.
Now, the more quick witted of my readers might jump to say that this is impossible, for biology, physics and sound mechanics would suggest that even in complete silence, we would be able to hear our heartbeat. People with hearing problems can still feel vibrations - no one is completely unaffected by sound waves. This is an excellent point, and a wonderful thing to focus on and realize the world of chaos that surrounds us, but for the purposes of this meditation, disregard that fact.
Try to do a mundane task - unzipping your backpack, getting dressed, eating a snack, sitting down, or even walking down the hallway - without making a single audible noise. As mentioned before, this task is physically impossible in the sense of quantum physics (our particles are always making vibrations and emitting energy), but it is not impossible from a practical sense. Is anyone able to do anything, no matter how mentally present, with complete perfection that makes not a single audible noise? I wonder if this is something Zen masters contemplate. You might notice that simple slips of a finger might let something loose or rub against another surface.
This awareness exercise it reminiscent of Angeles Arrien's book The Four Fold Path, in conjunction with the Warrior path. The warrior’s job is to show-up; to be present and mindful at all times. Trying to set up my desk from my backpack in a room with one other person and closed doors was extremely difficult but equally rewarding. It was the most I've ever felt aware of the present moment...the perpetual bloom of "now." Reaching that state of awareness also made me reflect on my perception of the world around me, which led to a movie idea...
_________________________________________________
_________________________________________________
Movie idea:
The camera is following the same view of someone walking down the street. Not necessarily POV as in on the shoulders and shaky, but POV as in the camera is pointed in a fixed direction, approximate to the facing direction of the person in question, moving in the direction and speed of travel (my girlfriend informed me that this is called "tracking"). At the instant any other person rolls in to frame and happens to make eye contact with the main view (symbolizing eye contact with two people), the camera's view immediately cuts to the new person's POV, briefly aligning person A's exterior with its previous interior, and person B's interior with its previous exterior.
For example, Person A is walking down the street, and sees Person B driving a minivan down the street, who happens to make eye contact with Person A. Immediately, we cut to Person B's perspective, such as a camera mounted on top of the minivan (or symbolizing the height with an artificial front of the vehicle and a movie trolley to reduce shake) which is now pointed directly in line with Person A's exterior image (a character that we could previously not see).
It would be as if Person A is seeing their reflection in someone else's perspective. Now, presumably (unless I could think of a good reason otherwise) the cut would take place in real time, so if this was modeling a real life situation, it would be complete chaos. The hypothesis would be that you would start somewhere and go very far just through the causal process of eye contact. Likewise, you also face the possibility of making eye contact with someone who is headed home - in which case the camera would be switching back and forth between family members who make eye contact. This, of course, would be the purpose of the experiment - finding where one line of perspective can take us.
Although filming it in real life would be literally impossible (unless we rigged an entire set population with cameras and just stopped the film when someone made eye contact with a person who doesn't have a camera. Or we could do a closed course, strategically choreographed set with a camera following each person that was set off by a remote trigger, but even then we'd have to have automatically rotating stands that would be making the authentic look of changing eye contact. I wonder if you started in a city how quickly you would end up in a rural area. I suppose the film would be an excellent example of chaos theory and systems dynamics. Technically speaking, even if the entire thing was choreographed, if you simply started on a different person (even Person B instead of Person A) you'd have an entirely different film, theoretically speaking. I suppose there have to be mathematics to support this; I'm going to look into it.
For example, Person A is walking down the street, and sees Person B driving a minivan down the street, who happens to make eye contact with Person A. Immediately, we cut to Person B's perspective, such as a camera mounted on top of the minivan (or symbolizing the height with an artificial front of the vehicle and a movie trolley to reduce shake) which is now pointed directly in line with Person A's exterior image (a character that we could previously not see).
It would be as if Person A is seeing their reflection in someone else's perspective. Now, presumably (unless I could think of a good reason otherwise) the cut would take place in real time, so if this was modeling a real life situation, it would be complete chaos. The hypothesis would be that you would start somewhere and go very far just through the causal process of eye contact. Likewise, you also face the possibility of making eye contact with someone who is headed home - in which case the camera would be switching back and forth between family members who make eye contact. This, of course, would be the purpose of the experiment - finding where one line of perspective can take us.
Although filming it in real life would be literally impossible (unless we rigged an entire set population with cameras and just stopped the film when someone made eye contact with a person who doesn't have a camera. Or we could do a closed course, strategically choreographed set with a camera following each person that was set off by a remote trigger, but even then we'd have to have automatically rotating stands that would be making the authentic look of changing eye contact. I wonder if you started in a city how quickly you would end up in a rural area. I suppose the film would be an excellent example of chaos theory and systems dynamics. Technically speaking, even if the entire thing was choreographed, if you simply started on a different person (even Person B instead of Person A) you'd have an entirely different film, theoretically speaking. I suppose there have to be mathematics to support this; I'm going to look into it.
Anyway, as an example, we have person A. We in fact have an infinite alphabet of people, each with their own unique personality and background. By transferring immediately from Person A's perspective to the next person in the alphabet that Person A encounters and this new person's perspective, it would be taking a linear approach to a chaotic world. But since no person transfers out of their body and follows a gaze, making a film like this would inevitably imply that reality itself is not linear but cyclical, or at least interconnected. I suppose this is where systems theory and chaos theory originated from...
How else could you ever explain an experiment like that mathematically without hitting a brick wall of a meta-dimensional mind-blowing realization that there is no such thing as objective reality (or at least not an objective reality that the human mind can comprehend)?
__________________________________________________
This comes back to free will - if we're not free to think about anything and everything, that is, if the human mind is limited by perception, what constitutes as a will that is free?
I added this video just to illustrate the limitations of our perception. We might be able to think about higher dimensions, but our perception is more or less limited to the third, even if our being is tied to higher dimensions through the simple fact that our atoms exist.
Does that limit our ability to act freely?
__________________________________________________
This comes back to free will - if we're not free to think about anything and everything, that is, if the human mind is limited by perception, what constitutes as a will that is free?
I added this video just to illustrate the limitations of our perception. We might be able to think about higher dimensions, but our perception is more or less limited to the third, even if our being is tied to higher dimensions through the simple fact that our atoms exist.
Does that limit our ability to act freely?
No comments:
Post a Comment