Human consciousness systems for modeling the world are
completely dependent on the idea of agency; that some agent wills or otherwise
directs events. And since agency
as we conceive it is completely illusory, we are doomed to be ‘wrong’ (also an
agency dependent idea!) in the vast majority of our actions in the world.
When we began as a species this was not a concern since our
illusions of agency were functioning in a world utterly dominated by
biophysical Reality; our notions of agency simply connected dots in that
reality at a speed and volume unavailable to other organisms, giving our
species a decided advantage. Later
on, the illusion became increasingly understood as reality to the point today
when we cannot even imagine another origin for action or order.
Our notions of agency derive from an adaptation that formed
through evolutionary processes which operate by principles devoid of
agency. It is these processes that
mediate changes and apparently, to humans, changes that have direction and
purpose. The Consciousness System
of Order (CSO) is organized around the illusion of agency; a device what
functions to a particular advantage in the evolutionary process. The capacity of the CSO to generate
actions that have no precedent in the history of biophysical Reality, in the
largest view, will be part of the consequence structure that permeates
biophysical systems; like the bringing together of a formulary of chemicals
that mix, act and react to become new forms that can exist in the ambient
conditions.
I said a moment ago that the CSO was “a device what
functions to a particular advantage in the evolutionary process.” And at the same time I am suggesting
that it has “gone wrong” in some way, that it is no longer functioning to
advantage. There are two parts to
this observation. One is that many
adaptations “go wrong” as ambient conditions change: for example if the acidity
of water increases, then calcium carbonate shells – so efficient and useful in
conditions of near neutral pH – become a route to extinction. The second part is that this adaptation
is unprecedented in the history of the universe, has barely begun to be refined
by the evolutionary process and, uniquely, by its own information handling
designs; it may actually contain the possibility of true agency.
But before getting too much into the complexities of our
present confusions it is important to get a sense of how the world functions
without agency as humans typically understand it. The first hurtle is that language is steeped in the
structure of the agency illusion: an agent imagines, wishes, designs and
implements; it is just “obvious” that that is how the world works. Little thought or attention is given to
the plain fact that the universe and solar system formed, life began and
evolved all billions of years before there was human or any other “known
agency.” What was functioning to give order and change, even directional
change, before the structures and processes that underlie the CSO? And more importantly, what is it that
continues to be the actual functional order within which the CSO needs to
comport? The two questions, of
course, have the same answer.
* * *
The question should not be, ‘How can the world work without
agency?’ It should be, ‘How can agency possibly work in a world of simple event
causation?’ But we think that we
understand agency and not causation without it, so that is a natural place to
begin.
The substance of the universe is in motion; motion is an
essential condition of a universe of energy (by substance I don’t just mean
matter, but all the “stuff” that is the universe, known or unknown to humans).
When the various forms of substance interact by the physical laws, a
probability system forms and a reaction process/product occurs corresponding to
the probabilities. After a time the composition and structure of a region
changes to represent the most stable population of reaction process/products as
determined by the ambient forces of the region: examples: hydrogen and oxygen
combine to form water molecules when ambient energies are low enough; atoms are
reduced to free protons, electrons and neutrons when temperatures are high
enough; molecules of many types form, combine and recombine when conditions of
stability, especially in an aqueous environment, endure for millions and
billions of years.
Given enough time everything with a positive probability,
almost no matter how small, will happen.
In a world of essentially infinite numbers even the clearly finite acts
infinitely. The earth’s oceans are
a thin layer spread over much of the thin rocky crust. How many drops of water are in the
finite ocean? There are about
twenty drops of water in a cubic centimeter; a thousand trillion cubic
centimeters in a cubic kilometer; almost 1.4 billion cubic kilometers of water
in the oceans – and that single drop of water has about ten thousand million
trillion molecules of water. So
the number of water molecules on the earth is more than ten thousand million
trillion times a thousand trillion times l.4 billion times twenty… pretty soon
you get into numbers of some real size (magnitude 10 to the 47th
power for you power-of-ten people).
And that is just the water. Dissolved in the water are all the elements and compounds
that can be formed in billions of years on a chemically and thermally stable planet;
even the rarest of the rare will be there by the billions of trillions of
trillions. Imagine a molecule that
forms by the chance action of interaction that can speed up the forming of
another molecule like itself, then that particular molecule will increase in
abundance; or another molecule that tends to break down a common molecule. With these kinds of numbers interacting
100s and 1000s of times per second for millions and billions of years every
combination that can happen will happen.
Some of those combinations will form systems of
interactions; some of these systems of combinations will become
self-sustaining. The essence is
that systems and molecules that are stable increase in number. Systems and molecules that tend to
increase the probability of their own formation increase in number. In conditions of great variety,
stability and duration these tendencies produce increases in complexity in the
organization of substance.
This accounts for the forms of matter that we see, for the
design of galaxies and solar systems, for the structure and natural history of
stars and other celestial bodies, for the structure and physical systems of the
earth and the other planets, for the origin of life and the evolution of the
earth’s life forms… in other words, this accounts for almost everything. The
only thing not accounted for is the behavior and imaginings of one species of
life that has only been around for a few hundred thousand years at the
most. And that species is only not
accounted for because of a unique adaptation (that I am calling The
Consciousness System of Order) that gives the species the option to believe and
disbelieve a process that every other species, ever in existence, simply
lives. Perhaps it would be more
accurate to say that the behaviors of that species are not accounted for by the
imaginings of that species because of the limitations of the Consciousness
Order, because its evolutionary design was to speed up and increase the detail
of response to environmental events, not to understand the world.
What is not generally realized is that the changes and
multiplication of objects and processes associated with humans are no more than
the speeding up of the combinations of possibilities. Our notions of agency are but illusions that mollify the
weakness of our capacities for comprehending the true complexities of Reality.
Just as children do not require, and even benefit from
simplifying, Reality so long as adults are around to deal with real events, so
humans have been protected from their failures to comport with Reality by
biophysical Reality itself. But
also like spoiled children who grow up, our species has grown to such powers
that not even biophysical Reality can challenge our hubris short of denying us
its continued stability and services.
It is now that we will discover if humans can muster true
agency or if we are utterly without it and only the creatures of events like
all other species.
The philosophy and psychology of agency has been a major
concern of human thought, spawning everything from gods, ghosts, and a
remarkable volume of almost completely impenetrable prose. I hope to play with some of that silly
putty shortly.
