Notions of Everything and Nothing

Anticipation is a requirement for what we humans call free will, and anticipation is a function of a thing‘s  limited memory. The other requirement for free will is a thing‘s ability to adjust an otherwise set action given new information. Before I get to that, however, I need to talk about growth.

Having been upgraded in my two recent posts about memory, our sphere from my first free will post has a good enough memory to repair damage to its membrane–its short-term memory. Now, imagine it grows and repairs by absorbing (or adsorbing, if you prefer a different visual) carbon molecules. Its memories, being merely smaller spheres within itself, also require them; if there is no carbon to absorb, then it can’t form new memories without damaging itself. Since our sphere is immobile, it must sit and wait for a stray molecule to bump into it, and can only grow and/or update its memory according to the frequency of this random bombardment. (That is unless it sacrifices an existing memory to do so, which it might.)

If it experiences too many events between updates–especially a variety–then the newly formed memory won’t be very accurate. It will be like taking several pictures on the same piece of film and trying to make sense of it as a single picture. Therefore, the higher the frequency of carbon (“food”) absorption, the more accurate its memories will be, which will aid its repair and thus aid its persistence.

So far, everything has happened to this sphere in darkness. Now, a light shines on it, and its membrane just so happens to be photosensitive, deforming along the gradient of light, moving along the surface it rests upon. As it rolls, blob-like, toward (or away from, it really doesn’t matter) the light, it absorbs from carbon that had built up on the ground, and builds a memory of light, movement, and food. The beginnings of perception and mobility.

Fast-forward hundeds, thousands, or millions of iterations according to the demands of your personal incredulity, and this sphere is sophisticated enough to see food several meters away and mobilize to go get it. How? An accident of memory consolidation. As memories within the sphere merge and purge to free up space for more memories, different memories glom into one, forming new associations. Sometimes these associations are detrimental to the sphere’s persistence and are eventually fogotten/purged (needles give us food), but sometimes they are beneficial, a new truth in the sphere’s world (light can show us a needle).

As the sphere grows, it increases how often it can eat and how much it can eat. It can store food so that it can travel further without food to get more food, absorb larger and greater variety of molecules for food, and see food at a distance to determine which direction to move in. More growth means storing an increased quantity and variety of accurate memories, things that form and change according to their own network of significant relationships, ultimately persisting and growing according to their own relationship with the parent sphere.

Does this grown sphere have more freedom than previously? I’d say so. It can respond to and anticipate more stimuli, mobilize to escape threats or find nourishment, and combine/distort memories to create novel behavior.

But even then, that may not be enough to convince anyone of gradations of free will. It is still, after all, just a deterministic system, only with more complexity. And indeed there is still more to this picture, namely the capacity to continuously adjust actions, which is what I believe should be the metric by which a will is determined to be free.

But I’ll complete the picture next time.

Tags: free will, growth, memory, philosophy, process, things, truth

This entry was posted on Friday, May 1st, 2009 at 12:15 am and is filed under General Notions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.