Religion Without Lies: Why We have Free Will

The Final Great Awakening of the human race, wherein we throw off the yoke of evolution by natural selection and embrace intelligent design of our morals to create a world of abundance.

The Future. And Welcome To it! 

It's up to you. You have Free Will. (You know you do.) Just as Rene Descartes could not doubt that he existed, "I think therefore I am"; you cannot doubt that you are and that you have that choice of doubting. You can doubt yourself and you can doubt that you have Free Will, but the act itself shows that you are and that you have Free Will. You are not a zombie. You are not a puppet. You are a sentient human being that can read and write and reason. You are a miracle of evolution about to take control of your own destiny. As it ever was, it will be. Consciousness is the original secular sin: awareness creates responsibility. To argue that there is no Free Will is arguing that evolution doesn't exist. And we know the evidence for evolution is huge and undeniable. [1]

There is no way for any human to disavow that they are conscious. Rene Descartes' "Cogito, ergo sum." is a crushingly obvious argument to anyone who thinks. There is an observer in your head and this observer thinks and it speaks and it writes. It cannot be denied by the observer themselves. These words and writings can affect other humans, other observers. And they can all influence each other. They can plan. They can judge. They can decide which ends to strive for. They can affect their future trajectories. The entire reason that consciousness has evolved is to support Free Will.

Imagine there is no Free Will, if you can. Let me paint the picture: You have dedicated yourself to only your local gods. No Free Will, but you still get to watch and to justify and to talk and to write, but you blindly obey the signals from your gods. You know, the ones that create your desires and instill their fears inside your mind. Who are these gods, you ask? They are the nerve pulse trains that come in your mind from your senses. And what is the mind? The mind is the brain sensing itself. The brain controls myriad feedback loops that keep you alive. Much of these control loops operate outside of your conscious control (blood pressure, digestion, body temperature, heartbeat, etc.), emotions simmering in the background, plucking the strings beneath your awareness. Your breathe, your hunger, your thirst, your actual gods; you must worship them or you will die.

The brain senses and controls these systems. The Mind is the system that senses and responds to these sensations and monitors these control systems. What is consciousness? It's the Mind sensing and attempting to control the Mind's control loops that are attempting to control the brain's control loops, it's watching itself. How does the brain control one of its minor gods? Like the minor god of core body temperature? The brain must maintain a core body temperature near 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit plus or minus a few degrees. If you start to heat up the brain will start to make the body sweat in an attempt to cool it down. If you get hotter, the body starts to convulse and fail and if you don't make the right sacrifice to your god, you will be punished and maybe die. (Maybe jump in some ice water?) 

The brain implements an unconscious control of the core body temperature system, the sensations are turned into emotions, into feelings in your conscious mind, as they deviate from the predicted homeostasis. The brain attempts to control the system so that the emotions are unneeded and it just works; but when it fails, the emotions generate fear and dread. The brain quietly regulates this system until it can't. It can predict that the sensations are changing into dangerous territory. What the brain can do and control is no longer enough to preserve its life. Panic time! 

The Mind monitors the brain, monitors all of its control loops and is the last resort to regulate this critical control loop before you perish. The Mind is sensing all of the systems in the brain, it can affect many of them and it can control your locomotion. You can influence anything your Mind can sense (typically.) How does the Mind sense itself? The Mind has to watch each of its systems that monitor the brain's systems. The Mind uses the basic emotional systems to signal itself to do the right thing. Feelings. Feelings are signals to pay attention to the underlying system. The Mind has to model itself and predict it's future state given your next action, it has to decide what to actually do.

The ability to plan is critical for our survival. To imagine ourselves as a separate entity from the world is critical. To identify yourself with your body is essential for adaptability and survivability. Imagine you hear the mythical philosophical zombie in your head. A voice that has lots of information and wisdom but does not realize it's in your head. It's either the voice of one of the minor gods keeping you alive or it's a random demon or devil. You can get advice from this voice, but since the voice isn't conscious it doesn't understand the context. It doesn't understand as well as you do because you understand the context. As sentient human beings we no longer accept these voices are gods, they're breakdowns of the normal communication between the brain and the mind. They are problems to be fixed.

It's obvious that consciousness is useful in adapting and surviving. Being aware of your own body, recognizing that you are wedded to the body, is of inestimable value. Having your Mind sense itself, recognizing itself and its body is of immense value for adapting and surviving. The evolutionary pressure to develop consciousness over zombies has to be enormous. The one who can plan and execute better is typically the survivor. And Evolution is all about survival. Consciousness is the recognition of your situation. What can you sense? What do you feel? There are three different kinds of systems you can sense:

1) Body sensations like thirst, breathe, hunger, temperature, body positions, pain and pleasure. All the internal sensations that arrive from the various nerves spread out through the body. The little gods of life that you must worship to survive.

2) External senses such as hearing, seeing, tasting and smelling. The things that tell you what objective reality looks like at the moment. 

3) Feelings, the conscious sensing of emotions that are flooded into the mind as the predictions of control fail when the brain starts to panic. 

What are you sensing when you sense an internal emotion? Each of these emotions you feel is in response to feedback from some brain control system. These feeling of fear and desire capture your conscious attention. There are connected to default instincts, plans of action associated with each different emotion, typically in pairs that attract you or send you into flight. 

The default emotional state is seeking or exploration. With social herd animals (like us) we seek the context, but we really seek each other. And if we can't find who we week we turn to grief. If we find what we seek we turn to care or lust. And if we don't like what we find we experience disgust. If what we find is dangerous then we either fight or take off (flight.) Each emotion activates a set of instinctual actions that are likely to be used to solve the problem in front of you. They suggest a set of scenarios to investigate to solve whatever problem is in front of you. Your Free Will, your ability to evaluate future situations and determine your preferences are fundamental to your adaptability and survival.

The feelings introduce preferred actions to the Mind. The conscious Mind can imagine itself and the state of its body after taking its preferred actions: Fight? Feint? Freeze? Flight? And proceeds to implement the course of action with the best predicted outcome. This is how you adapt and survive. The whole point of brain bringing this problem to consciousness is to use the planning and deciding abilities of Free Will. It's not enough to be aware of what's going on if you can't affect it. It would be like a control system without feedback, incapable of actually controlling anything. If you don't have the ability to affect yourself, there would be no point of consciousness, of being aware. Free Will is the feedback that lets you learn, that lets you adapt and survive, no matter what the context. It lets you set your own goals and rewards, you can pick and choose your heart's desire.

To claim this obvious phenomenon does not exist is to beg the question then of who is making this claim? It's an imposed paradox because of a misunderstanding of what a model is. A model is a description of a thing, not the thing itself. Because Newton invented a very accurate (but definitely wrong) theory of gravity did not change what gravity actually was. Because we are making new neuron based models of what the brain does does not change what the Mind actually is and how it uses consciousness to implement Free Will. The very definition of life is emergent behavior that cannot be predicted except by context. Once life is created, evolution spends its time creating competence without understanding. Competence about controlling itself evolves into understanding: consciousness with Free Will.

Why is this important? It tells us why we are here.

You've heard of the is/ought problem? Just because something is doesn't mean that it ought to be. Whatever is comes from history and evolution. Evolution points you towards survival, not towards being a moral creature. That little voice you hear in your head, those little pangs of conscience are only meant to keep you alive, not ethical (a concept created only recently by human beings.) The Final Great Awakening of the human race is to realize that we are more than our evolved instincts. [2] We can reason. We can design our moral landscape. This is what religions have attempted to do for thousands of years. The problem of religion is that they write down the answers, not the process. Once the word becomes Holy, it cannot be changed. We write tons of books that interpret what the Holy words mean so we can all agree. 

But humanity is still learning, still getting better, producing more knowledge, more capabilities, more machines and systems to extend our reach. Things change. For instance, nuclear bombs are a new thing, invented recently, in our lifetimes. No religion can have anything written about this issue in the past because it didn't exist before. Things change, but written words do not. It's not answers we need but understanding of the right processes to get the best answers is the critical skill for survival. We have the consciousness to understand whats going on and the Free Will to change ourselves and humanity to meet any new challenges. Given Free Will it is our responsibility to intelligently design our morals and ethical systems to be the best possible ones. We can imagine what ought to be and should make it so.

This is our destiny. This our reason for living. This is why we are here. To witness and have dominion over the universe. Let's hope we can start before the killer (alien?) robots appear, for they will. We need to be ready. We need more people to understand that Religions are not your friends. Religions divide us from the truth in order to control our lives and to greedily extract our wealth by using our social instincts to capture our need for care, to misuse our faith for their own selfish purposes.

We need to disown the Religions of Lies and join together in the one true creed: The Religion Without Lies, the largest religion on this earth; the Religion of the Nones. The Religion of Free Thought. The Religion of Truth and Light. The Religion of Learning and Reasoning, of Feeling and Experience. The one true Religion of humanity: the Religion Without Lies. Come join us. There are many sects in the world. One of them is perfect for you. Celebrate humanity and abundance. Get on with your life!

Thanks for reading!

 -Dr. Mike

[1] I make the argument that the competence evolution designed consciousness for was Free Will. Thus the system that designed competence without understanding also designed understanding without competence.

[2] Evolution has been guided by humans for a long time. See Darwin's later volumes on Sexual Selection (Choose who is to be born and create offspring with) versus death and lack of offspring. Evolution depends on birth and death to regulate it. Humans have been domesticating themselves forever. We just figured out how to domesticate other species in historical times. We are just recognizing that we have been domesticating ourselves for a much longer period. This recognition has profound consequences on our future. First, it has consequences for research and bodies of knowledge and practice. Second, it lays the framework for all future decision making.