It’s hard to tell anymore what the trends are in pop-sci-culture with the way we are fed content via the machines. I’ve had a whole lot of “free will” pushed into my online notice in recent weeks. Much of this content is related to the proposition of purposelessness that Robert Sapolsky has made with his book Determined. I did listen to this Audible book a couple months back, and presumably the machines are well aware of that, and as such are willing this related content in my direction. One of these pieces, the greatest grabber of my interest but turned out to be disappointingly unrevealing, was a podcasted debate between Robert Sapolsky and Daniel Dennett. Daniel Dennett is the most familiar to me adherent of compatibilism, that is the contention that free will is not incompatible with a determinism. Dennett’s perspective, (my possibly inaccurate interpretation) is that we do in fact have free will, if we constrain the boundaries of an individual’s decision making to only the psychological variables relevant to the context of the situation that demands a conscious decision. At least that’s the best argument I can make based on my understanding of his. And I do want to find a good argument for the compatibility of free will in a deterministic framework of human behavior. A core premise, or assumption, of this point of view is that conscious decisions directly influence behavior. And this is a hard case to make, particularly since we can’t find a good scientific, much less conversational baseline to start to flesh out what consciousness is.

Consciousness and Self Awareness

It is often claimed that consciousness is somehow special and potentially inexplicable. The nature of consciousness - how it’s defined, what forces and machinery it is built on, where those systems reside and what their boundaries are - may be so difficult to pin down because language and consciousness seem to me to be in service of the same biological function using much of the same machinery. It is not apparent to me that consciousness is categorically different than any other aspect of the systems that manage biological behavior.

Consciousness may be a consequence of evolution providing an adaptive lever for social cooperation. What better way to provide a selective pressure for cooperation than to develop some sensory mechanism for social alignment? That begs the question can we have consciousness without a role, or a Sense of self? Just to make a point for the sake of clarity, I don’t want to suggest that this Sense of self implies or would require self awareness. A perceptual Sense that provides useful stimulus in this regard might be achievable in a primitive Sense of self, not necessarily in a complex form we now hold, but maybe in some more rudimentary sense that provides simple social accountability. Such a Sense could have evolved into greater complexity as a stronger more broad Sense of self provided better collective problem solving and the distribution of increasingly complex tasks. This in turn could have evolved into the ability to recount and simulate situations to predict and coordinate. Maybe this led to complex language or vice versa? Either way this simulation would be what we might consider imagination. This imagination might be all there is to the Sense of consciousness. From what we think we understand about how the brain relates to behavior, how it dictates behavior, the entirety of this imaginative process occurs after we behave. That is to say that all of our decisions and actions are made before we imagine them, or before we become “conscious” of them. It may be that these simulations are necessary to manage the temporal complexities of cooperation.

Consciousness may be nothing more than a complex, but not categorically special, sensory mechanism to provide simulated stimuli to drive behavior that supports advanced social coordination.

This is place where I can publish my ideas for the audience of me. I have an ever growing number of thixotropic reasons for setting up this platform. Probably the greatest overarching argument is to give me a place where I can air out my most persistent ruminations. This, in my fuzzy uncheckable logic, might - just might - provide some time and virtual space between my, in-this-moment thoughts, and my many-later-moments reconsiderations, allowing me to take them in with fresher, or simply differently focused eyes. In support of that objective I hope this platform will also allow me to write and publish more freely, with the only critic I might choose to answer to being that one (or small set) that resides in my mind, wherever that lives inside of me.

Subject Matter

Also in support of the aspiration of being free to think out loud, this pseudonymous space will free me up to voice my thoughts on matters which I haven’t a great depth of understanding, but do nonetheless compulsively give inordinate consideration.

I have other platforms where I do write about subjects which I’m expected to have some at least above average level of expertise. In those domains, I need to maintain a level of professional decorum. It is particularly important that my voice in those areas is perceived as level and objective.

It appears that we are in a period (hopefully just a period) where all topics of any societal importance get saddled with sometimes bizarre and most often inappropriate political or otherwise dogmatic baggage. This coupled with the internet enabled democratization of journalism and its light-speed distribution, make very murky the veracity and utility of much of modern media content.

Areas of intrigue

With the above in mind I will make every effort to identify and take ownership of my biases on the topics explored in this site Four Sore Eyes. My thinking right now is that I will categorize topics into the following areas:

1. Personal - Posts labeled as such will focus on my subjective relationship to extrinsic (natural and social) and intrinsic (physiological and psychological) aspects of my identity. This category is entirely for my own indulgence in pursuit of better self awareness. There may be relatable content to a happenstance reader, but I’m exceedingly skeptical when it comes to prescriptive actions based on another individual’s experience, including my own. My intention is to make that very clear when sharing my personal experiences.

2. Science - I do have some expertise here in a few topics, namely specific narrow areas of biochemistry and molecular biophysics. Nonetheless I give quite a lot of mental energy to many other areas of science, particularly in subjects that I perceive might intersect with my topics of expertise. That is not to say that I also don’t find myself in many other, sometimes extremely, unfamiliar territories.

3. Technology - My occupation is primarily as a technologist. I spend the bulk of my paycheck earning time as a superficial engineer working with degreed engineers, and occasionally scientists of varied disciplines, to identify and solve technical problems that someone feels they have a sufficiently critical need to solve such that they are willing to pay to do so.

4. Health and Medicine - These areas may deserve to be broken out, but for now they will remain associated. Much of my passion driven work (as opposed to paycheck driven) is in matters of health and medicine. My apprehension about categorizing these together stems from the fact that I see Health and Medicine as different from one another as Science and Engineering. Clearly they are related, but one is descriptive and sometimes aspirational and the other prescriptive and sometimes impersonal.* I’m going to put a pin in this because I don’t feel that’s a sufficiently precise or even accurate capture of my sentiments. Maybe I come back and correct it here, or more likely I’ll let it stand and clarify in future posts.

5. Humanity - This is domain where I admittedly have the least understanding. But I’m not sure my understanding of existential human matters is any less astute than many of the more prominent philosophical talking heads. No matter, my writing on topics related to the human experience may help me better understand and appreciate how we are all connected and what if any purpose or meaning there is to it all.

I think that covers it for what I wanted to convey with this introduction to a site Four Sore Eyes.

Thanks for reading.

With kindness,

Barry