[ExI] Why Bell's theorem doesn't matter

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Mon, Nov 28, 2016 at 1:39 AM, Stuart LaForge <avant at sollegro.com> wrote:
>
>
> Free will is the ability to choose something because you want to. Neither
> the cuckoo clock, nor the roulette wheel can express intent. Therefore
> neither has free will.


### Free will is what happens when an evolved specialized mental module
meets challenges it was not selected for, and ends up running in circles
like a headless chicken.

As soon as primates started living in monkey troops where deception,
coercion, trade and flattery existed, a need arose for an ability to detect
when somebody is screwing with your mind. Those monkeys who didn't even see
they were being screwed over, did get royally screwed over, and failed to
contribute their genes to subsequent generations. Fast-forward a couple of
million years, and we have a finely tuned social sense that speaks up
angrily whenever it detects standard outside attempts at controlling our
behavior. The result may be a fawning submission or a roaring challenge,
depending on the circumstances, but attempts at control do not remain
unnoticed.

If you let this specialized mental module loose into the thickets of
ontology and metaphysics, far away from its natural habitat, it twists
itself into pretzels of confusion. The module thinks that the brain,
analyzed as an object rather than seen as self, is an outside influence.
How could this brain, with its weird chemicals and stuff, be responsible
for the wonderful mental life the module guards against intrusion? Back in
the day, the module never met brains, it only met other people - models of
minds that could exert influence through words and actions. Then science
with its scalpel and looking-glass, invented the brain, an ungainly lump of
jelly. The brain purportedly thinks and acts, and its thoughts are supposed
to be treated as self but the model used to describe it, impersonal and
anatomical, does not feel like a person, much less self.

To avoid anxiety, and with the help of imagination, the module makes up
something intangible, a soul, a freewill, that it can see as self, and when
the soul/self calls the shots, no alarm needs to be sounded. You take away
the freewill, and the module gets upset, threatened by a vision of the
brain that it does not really understand.

This is why even some highly intelligent people cannot emotionally deal
with materialistic self-reflection, with physical determinism as applied to
their mental life. They feel such notions threaten them in the same way a
threatening alpha threatened their pitiful beta ancestors.

I am not upset when I think about myself as a material object, a device
even, endowed with a mental life fully determined by the weird chemicals in
three pounds of jelly. It does not matter if the device has
quantum-mechanical properties, or if it is a classically deterministic
system - my brain embodies me, and therefore it is an instrument of my will.

So really, superdeterminism in the interpretation of Bell's theorem is
completely fine with me. If my thoughts are predetermined by the details of
the Calabi-Yau manifold structure at the beginning our time, then my will
is a will of the universe, and that's a good thing, too.

Rafal
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