Free Choice in World 2.0

Published on 2022-11-26 by Michael Stanton

A good friend and I talked about a “just physics” world in which free choice is highly limited by complex circumstances.

We allowed that it can occur, but more rarely than we wish. We said that the good use of free will could be recognized from afar by seeing that a particular “ball” in this world moves in any direction which fails to maximally satisfy existing constraints. One such constraint is self-interest, defined as that force which boosts the value of some real attribute like wealth, status or power. (status is the most subjective here...but is nonetheless boosted by polling all beings of the world and receiving an incrementally higher score than before the given action, which might be quite small).

A being that moves in the world in surprising ways from this remote perspective may be an indicator of the existence of that imagined quality called “God's love.”

For because our imagined God is said to value the freedom of His creatures above all else, He cannot intervene in the presence of strong existing forces. For those forces were set in motion by other beings of this world, whose freedom he values too.

Why have we imagined a God that gives such freedom? Because we've seen that we learn from mistakes? Because we are “little scientists” who need to see the results of our experiments in living play out in the world? A possible answer is that we are “made in His image,” and the subjective parts of us are a part of that image, too. Perhaps this God learned best from such an idea of freedom, and so propagates it into His world and the minds of His creatures. Either way, the idea is there.

Returning to our toy world, suppose we could observe a harmful action and avert or dampen it. This is what people who are angry about the needless suffering in the world would like (who can blame them?!): that the God figure act as a referee, preventing certain actions, with miracles, say. And, in this view, the bolder the miracle, the better for us to have seen the referee at work, and the easier for us to not only believe in Him, but approve.

Let's call this World 2.0...where the careless owner has returned from an apparent vacation in which he sent us ineffectual “thoughts-and-prayers.” Now things will get interesting...now we'll finally have justice!

Let's check in...

I see continual movement among the creatures, with occasional “wham!” injections of force that blunt or block. I expect to see some measurement like contentment increase, and in some quarters this is so, but in others it is decreasing. Why?

Well, many actions that appear “bad” appear to be good seen from another vantage point. Culture changes rapidly. Only 2000 years ago a man who freed his slaves might be castigated by his whole society. “You are giving them the freedom to starve! Why do you fail in your duty to protect, you with the resources to employ slaves?” they would have said long ago. So, in the world, good and bad are labels that only roughly correspond to a “real” idea of good and bad. To the extent that the referee steps into these decisions, his calls will also be labeled good and bad. Such a god becomes a part of the world he created and is judged by the creatures in it...and found wanting, because there is no chance of perfection in his calls, as seen by all.

How about the blunting of actions which under any standard must be labeled as bad...the murder of a child, perhaps? Surely, His calls will receive universal acclaim. I would say, at first, yes.

However, what about the evildoer? The action he tried to do was thwarted. Will he say to himself “oh! I think God intervened, therefore what I tried to do was evil. Therefore I should not try such things anymore?”

Sometimes, yes.

But some will persist in trying to do evil. Being blocked in obvious evil, they will move their scopes of action to those places where, increasingly, God's interventions are coming under fire. They would seek to undertake polarizing actions, which some view as good and others bad. When the action is unblocked, they would crow about it. “My action is very good, for God approved!” they could say. When the action is blocked they can find a ready audience before which to rage. A party of separatists will form around these beings, for, despite their evil, they do have a real charge against God: he violates free will. And that violates us in some way, and we prepare for war.

You'll say to me: “your toy world is too much of a toy. Why not reach deeper into the evil beings, stopping their evil action not at the penultimate moment, but before the thought occurs that precipitated the action?”

Good point...I was ignoring the subjective interiors of the creatures too much. Those interiors are a part of the world, too, and must be subject to manipulation. There are many moments at which the referee god can intervene and quash a thought.

I still assert that we'll end up in the same place, with a divided world.

He quashes a thought right before it would have gone bad, leading to several follow-on thoughts which finally resulted in action. But the quashed thought was in a chain which goes further back. Quashing must be an invisible act. Because otherwise the being would be overwhelmed by notifications of “quash events” at various levels of his psyche, and might go insane.

If a thought-chain was silently quashed at some point, wouldn't it just begin again? In fact, after quashing the same thought 6 million times, wouldn't the being begin to notice that his model of reality is divering from expectations? That is, he tries to finish a thought, and goes blank. And it happens over and over. Something is wrong with him, he thinks.

He begins to experiment. When and how do the blank spaces appear in his psyche? Here is one...and here not. Eventually, conferring with others, it becomes clear that in this world God is terminating thought-chains. But the creature is frustrated. He can't see why this thought-chain was leading to evil. It's simply not clear to him. We know he should “leave it alone” and move on to other thoughts.

But we are humans. We know what will happen! 😀

Many, or most, will move on. But some will stubbornly persist. They believe their thought-chain was good and that an injustice is being performed on them. They will become exquisitely sensitive to the moment of quashing, and attempt to translate their thought-chain into another one, coming from a different start point and apparently heading in a different direction, but retaining some essential truth from the original chain. The work of the referee will multiply, and grow ever more subtle. The world has selected for a race of beings who have mapped out interior space so well that they feel the outrages of the quashed-thought to the same degree an earlier set of beings felt the outrage of crude, physical action by the referee. Given sufficient time, calls for separation will grow just as long and loud as before.

The referee will finally simply have to kill these beings before they can think any thought at all. And then we've arrived at a strange place: a God who kills babies for no reason that anyone can see. And those deaths were not misfortunes, they were positive acts (positive in the sense that will was applied to bring them about). Perhaps knowing that is where things ended up, the beings in the world will tell themselves, “God is just.” But it must ring quite hollow, for the logic of this God has grown so subtle as to really be injustice. And now man will hate God, and have good reason for it.

The failure to value freedom leads to active murder, by the powerful against the relatively powerless, in order to protect the powerless. But no longer to teach them. No, the door of teaching is shut. Because the creatures cannot run experiments. They can't be trusted to move from the worse to the better, and from the better to the best.

Would you want to live in World 2.0?

I'd rather be selected via bad thought-chain and killed at birth, because why live if you can't think freely? There is nothing else useful to do in a 4 dimensional world, frankly. For even when I am acted on by forces stronger than me, I still have my interior space. I still get to decide how I feel about it. And when the moment comes that external force lessens, and I acquire some freedom of motion, I can live the way my internal ruminations led me to believe I should. This is something like winning the game.

Am I doing evil? Perhaps. But I have many chances to learn this. I will see the hurt face of a friend. I will see tears of my beloved. I will find myself alone, divested of all former friends. In time, forces I set in motion with my actions will acquire strength and begin to act on me again. In my interior, as I become again the “acted upon,” I can think about why I'm jostled about. I have a chance to piece together my own culpability in the events that follow.

In time, the forces quiet down again.

What will I do now?