Is the future determined or do we create it? What if it's both? The self-organizing universe theory suggests a grand plan but leaves room for human freedom and creativity.
Yes. Definitely synchronistic. You should be at least a plenary speaker at next year's conference. Deepak Chopra was a plenary speaker--not even a keynote. It's an unusually open and seeking mix of researchers, theorists, and philosophers.They need you to help put everything together. My/our substack is just getting off the ground: mauiinstitute.substack.com I have an ARC of my book
Seeing: A Field Guide to the Patterns and Processes of Nature, Culture, and Consciousness. I sent my email to you in a LinkedIn message a few days ago. I rarely get my own messages! Can't wait to read your next book!
Oh I will definitely check that out then and subscribe to your substack. Yes, I think I'll apply to be a speaker next year. Your Substack looks really cool, I recommended it and look forward to exploring the articles after I present at this ICON conference next weekend (I have a week to prepare a presentation from scratch).
«In this world, the universe evolves along a predetermined trajectory…»
I believe a distinction should be made between undetermined/creative evolution and predetermined evolution, both of which are compatible with self-organization and the union of chance and determinism. Predetermined evolution implies finalism, a strict sense of teleology, to which recourse to something other (the «plan») must exist in addition to the universe. A self-organizing universe does not necessitate predetermination however: «undetermined» evolution is equally an option wherein creative agency is central to the cosmos. This might merely be an allergic reaction to the term «predetermination».
Bergson’s work Creative Evolution is insightful in this context: «But, if the evolution of life is something other than a series of adaptations to accidental circumstances, so also it is not the realization of a plan. A plan is given in advance. It is represented, or at least representable, before its realization. The complete execution of it may be put off to a distant future, or even indefinitely; but the idea is none the less formulable at the present time, in terms actually given. If, on the contrary, evolution is a creation unceasingly renewed, it creates, as it goes on, not only the forms of life, but the ideas that will enable the intellect to understand it, the terms which will serve to express it. That is to say that its future overflows its present, and can not be sketched out therein in an idea.»
Nice discussion — but what I'm trying to articulate is that there is a general plan that involves life spreading through the cosmos, and at the same time this is a truly creative process consistent with Bergson's view. We can only see the plan as a sketch, because the details truly aren't determined. So if there did happen to be a creator, even that creator wouldn't know the future precisely. But a self-organizing universe absolutely would have a general trajectory towards a cosmic attractor which would be complex, integrated, and harmonious in its activity.
I do think there's a rough "building plan" or "cosmic script," to quote Roy Gould and Paul Davies, respectively. What I'm saying is that there is no specific determined set of states where everything is set in stone from the beginning. There is true randomness so the universe is a stochastic learning system that is computing its trajectory toward a self-aware state. So it is Bergson-esque in that it is this truly creative process, where conscious agents are determined the future, and what that future looks like in perfect detail is not written in advance. But there is a general self-organizing tendency because creative evolution can only create more and more complexity, organization, and integration. I believe that it is not inconsistent to say that there is a developmental plan the way there is with an organism that evolves from embryo to maturity, but within that developmental trajectory there is a lot that is not determined, hence why twins turn out so different. I also believe that this ultimately leads to a self-aware state of the cosmos, though that is more speculative.
I also don't think that it is an error to ask whether this universe as a self-organizing system is a product of an intelligent agent, or a larger evolutionary process that is at the cosmological level (cosmological natural selection). If we can in theory create new realities with conscious agents in the future, then the concept of naturalism must be extended to include the possibility that we are such a creation. And if we are, then we can also wonder about the process that created the agent (god) that created our world.
I think no matter whether your model introduces an intelligent designer, you have to explain the origin of that designer, and that leads you back to an ultimate answer being that reality is simply biocentric, or mind-centric, and recursive, continuously creating more complexity but also consciousness.
So the story involves a grand plan, so a sort of destiny, but also true randomness, and also free will, because the agents are what determine the exact details of that destiny, since the fabric of reality is stochastic. At the same time, the agents are not separate from the universe, but manifestations of it that encode reality and build world models and imagine possible futures then bring those futures into existence.
I didn't bring up Christianity, but basically offers a solution that is consistent with physical law that allows for a grand plan/destiny at the same time as allowing true free will at the individual level.
I do understand the point your making well though, as the self-organizing universe alternative to the idea of a strict determinism is this idea of a truly open future that is being created in the moment by life, a la Bergson, Prigogine, and Stu Kauffman. I support that view — I'm just saying that if you follow that view to its logical conclusions, then what you see is a self-organizing universe that at some point is going to become so saturated with life that it is going to become a self-actualizing universe — a distributed computational system that mirrors a brain at the cosmic scale. And when you admit that, then it certainly seems like the universe was just a system trying to become self-aware all along.
This is really interesting stuff, and touches on subjects I'm including in my new book, such as the dialectic and unity of opposites, which you'll find mentioned in other posts on this site. I'm trying to grasp what you and McGilchrist mean by "the non-duality of duality and non-duality" though. Want to explain that a bit more? I ask only because I've been thinking along those lines, though that's a bit loopy. Your perspective feels pretty metamodern and resonates, but what I sense is a bit of postmodern ideology that is overly suspicious of ideas about final states and grand narratives, when I think the true answer to reality is seeing what I'm calling "the grand narrative of existence" or maybe "the grandest narrative," which is this natural cosmic teleology that leads to a self-aware universe. I think it's the most mind blowing idea ever and what everything is pointing to, but because the Enlightenment era philosophy of progress became associated with bad things like environmental harm, colonialism, and eugenics, academics became opposed to the whole idea. So the attempt to tell the same story, but to get rid of the final destination or teleology by framing it the way you are wanting to above, the Bergson way, to me seems to just be appealing to postmodernists who don't need to be catered to because they were wrong. There are dangers to hierarchies and not taking into account subjectivity and relativism, and postmodernism served a purpose because it pointed out the blind spots. That's the power of the dialectic. But I think the metamodern view is a return to the grand narrative but with a process ontology and an ontology that "reality is relational," all while still seeing that the story is one of cosmic awakening. Hope that makes sense.
I really appreciate the in-depth comments, thank you! I will talk to my understanding and usage of the quote in the context it is used: As is the main topic of that essay, the tension/continuum/whole precedes any polarities/divisions/parts we abstract from it in the course of our epistemic endeavors. The view I am outlining also holds to holism, so the tension/continuum/whole is more than the sum of the parts, and as such it cannot be recovered from the parts. But the parts, though «only» abstractions of the whole, are also in and of reality, and they matter immensely through our engagement with them. As such, for the whole and its parts, it is not a case of «either/or», but «both/and». This «both/and» of the parts and the whole they are parts of is the non-duality of duality (parts) and non-duality (whole). I don’t know if this makes it clearer.
My current understanding and philosophy is hard to condense into a brief comment, but I can try to say something that touches on «cosmic awareness»: my view is that reality is in or of experience (I argue for why I prefer the term experience over e.g. consciousness or mind in the essay Experience and Immersion). Experience is the only «given», the stage on which our world takes place, all our memories, knowledge, feelings, actions etc. The narrative that our experience is secondary to a physical universe is a narrative I view as inverted. My current take is also that «grand narratives» play into this inversion (but I do not at present exclude narratives completely, I’ll have to think more about them). Because reality is in experience already, the cosmos is already aware. As experiencers we co-operatively make reality, and we make it in such a way that is coherent, thus orderly, and we in part conceive this orderliness as preceding our experience of it, which opens up the path of the inversion. The bottom line is, in my view, the cosmos is already fully experiential (aware), it is just that we are still deeply locked into narratives and explanations that lead us to think otherwise.
I don’t know if this makes sense to you or not, and I do realize this philosophy might seem «out there». I’m currently working on an essay that summarizes this view further (tentatively named Holistic Panenexperientialism), but another «summary» is this: https://tmfow.substack.com/p/a-view-of-reality-as-a-whole
Great article! Definitely some interesting concepts that could be elaborated on more in-depth (this would be a great subject for a book) but very well-written synthesis!
Love your post. We're on the same path. I just came off of last week's Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson. I submitted an abstract for a concurrent session on applying systems science to integrate scientific, philosophical, and spiritual approaches to consciousness. I listed it under the topic area of "Physical and Biologicial Sciences -- Complexity" but I added a note saying that they could stick me anywhere. They put me into "Free Will and Determinism." At first I thought, "Ugh." But then I thought, "Perfect!" One ppt says: Every system in existence is anticipating and organizing within an its continually organizing environment. We require and seek energy and information to exist (determined). To do that, we humans reason, imagine, remember, and create within complex networks of human activity (free will).
You are lucky you got to attend! I hope to in the future. Your work sounds really interesting and in line with mine. Definitely feels synchronistic. If you have a substack I'd be happy to recommend it.
"Then, the conscious mind selects from that new menu of possibilities. This selection process could be said to represent free will."
But isn't that selection from a menu the very thing free will is supposed to be about? What makes us pick one or the other? The question arises every time we speak of "choice".
My canonical example for free will is when I've already decided to have soup for dinner and am standing in front of my pantry looking at the four or five varieties of soup I have trying to decide which to eat. The decision is essentially consequence-free -- I can't make a "mistake" (because I like them all) -- so it seems ideal for considering exactly how I pick one. With a key question: if we could roll back the universe to that same point, would I always end up making the same choice? If I lack free will, I do.
I agree that chaos and the inability of starting states to have enough information to fully predict later states leads to a more novel world than one that's fully deterministic. But it says nothing about how we *navigate* among those novelties, which is where free will matters. It doesn't address the *mechanism* of free will. FWIW, I think it has to do with how our minds can have multiple and mixed thoughts about something (an extreme example being love/hate). Presented with multiple possible futures we imagine, one of them somehow "wins".
As for self-organization, isn't it interesting that in a universe where entropy ultimately always wins, the fundamental rules allow for the formation of incredible complexity? Just add energy and lots of time.
The concept of being free means that which is without initiation, motivation or influence. There is nothing on this planet that is without influence. Everything that moves has an initiation and everything in existence is motivated by an exterior force or forces. The ability of human beings to arrive at decisions is fully dependent on specific experiences, educations and predictabilities. My challenge to you is to find that which is free from influences. Fron this point of view all of your interests, concerns, worries, predictions and comparisons are completely dependent on your history for which you have no credit, nor can you be blamed for your behavior. Our world does not allow for prevention, nor does it adequately provide human beings with the necessary tools for socialization and cooperation. Predetermination is an assumption and an unnecessary characteristic for understanding the nonexistence of free will.
I love your work so much, Bobby. I believe individual self-realization is intertwined with collective self-realization, and ultimately, universal self-realization is possible. I don't know what that means because it's over the horizon imo, but I believe we need to figure out how to come together as a civilization to walk that path and find out.
Very nice summary of the relationship between randomness and free will. However, it works only if a mind-body dualism is assumed, because otherwise there couldn't be a distinction between an agent making a choice and the randomness in Nature and, thereby, would lead to a random behavior as well. You might like to read my article on this here: https://doi.org/10.53765/20512201.30.5.032
Yes. Definitely synchronistic. You should be at least a plenary speaker at next year's conference. Deepak Chopra was a plenary speaker--not even a keynote. It's an unusually open and seeking mix of researchers, theorists, and philosophers.They need you to help put everything together. My/our substack is just getting off the ground: mauiinstitute.substack.com I have an ARC of my book
Seeing: A Field Guide to the Patterns and Processes of Nature, Culture, and Consciousness. I sent my email to you in a LinkedIn message a few days ago. I rarely get my own messages! Can't wait to read your next book!
Oh I will definitely check that out then and subscribe to your substack. Yes, I think I'll apply to be a speaker next year. Your Substack looks really cool, I recommended it and look forward to exploring the articles after I present at this ICON conference next weekend (I have a week to prepare a presentation from scratch).
«In this world, the universe evolves along a predetermined trajectory…»
I believe a distinction should be made between undetermined/creative evolution and predetermined evolution, both of which are compatible with self-organization and the union of chance and determinism. Predetermined evolution implies finalism, a strict sense of teleology, to which recourse to something other (the «plan») must exist in addition to the universe. A self-organizing universe does not necessitate predetermination however: «undetermined» evolution is equally an option wherein creative agency is central to the cosmos. This might merely be an allergic reaction to the term «predetermination».
Bergson’s work Creative Evolution is insightful in this context: «But, if the evolution of life is something other than a series of adaptations to accidental circumstances, so also it is not the realization of a plan. A plan is given in advance. It is represented, or at least representable, before its realization. The complete execution of it may be put off to a distant future, or even indefinitely; but the idea is none the less formulable at the present time, in terms actually given. If, on the contrary, evolution is a creation unceasingly renewed, it creates, as it goes on, not only the forms of life, but the ideas that will enable the intellect to understand it, the terms which will serve to express it. That is to say that its future overflows its present, and can not be sketched out therein in an idea.»
Nice discussion — but what I'm trying to articulate is that there is a general plan that involves life spreading through the cosmos, and at the same time this is a truly creative process consistent with Bergson's view. We can only see the plan as a sketch, because the details truly aren't determined. So if there did happen to be a creator, even that creator wouldn't know the future precisely. But a self-organizing universe absolutely would have a general trajectory towards a cosmic attractor which would be complex, integrated, and harmonious in its activity.
I think I see your position - «predetermination» in terms of trend/tendency, not plan/final state.
I do think there's a rough "building plan" or "cosmic script," to quote Roy Gould and Paul Davies, respectively. What I'm saying is that there is no specific determined set of states where everything is set in stone from the beginning. There is true randomness so the universe is a stochastic learning system that is computing its trajectory toward a self-aware state. So it is Bergson-esque in that it is this truly creative process, where conscious agents are determined the future, and what that future looks like in perfect detail is not written in advance. But there is a general self-organizing tendency because creative evolution can only create more and more complexity, organization, and integration. I believe that it is not inconsistent to say that there is a developmental plan the way there is with an organism that evolves from embryo to maturity, but within that developmental trajectory there is a lot that is not determined, hence why twins turn out so different. I also believe that this ultimately leads to a self-aware state of the cosmos, though that is more speculative.
I also don't think that it is an error to ask whether this universe as a self-organizing system is a product of an intelligent agent, or a larger evolutionary process that is at the cosmological level (cosmological natural selection). If we can in theory create new realities with conscious agents in the future, then the concept of naturalism must be extended to include the possibility that we are such a creation. And if we are, then we can also wonder about the process that created the agent (god) that created our world.
I think no matter whether your model introduces an intelligent designer, you have to explain the origin of that designer, and that leads you back to an ultimate answer being that reality is simply biocentric, or mind-centric, and recursive, continuously creating more complexity but also consciousness.
So the story involves a grand plan, so a sort of destiny, but also true randomness, and also free will, because the agents are what determine the exact details of that destiny, since the fabric of reality is stochastic. At the same time, the agents are not separate from the universe, but manifestations of it that encode reality and build world models and imagine possible futures then bring those futures into existence.
I didn't bring up Christianity, but basically offers a solution that is consistent with physical law that allows for a grand plan/destiny at the same time as allowing true free will at the individual level.
I do understand the point your making well though, as the self-organizing universe alternative to the idea of a strict determinism is this idea of a truly open future that is being created in the moment by life, a la Bergson, Prigogine, and Stu Kauffman. I support that view — I'm just saying that if you follow that view to its logical conclusions, then what you see is a self-organizing universe that at some point is going to become so saturated with life that it is going to become a self-actualizing universe — a distributed computational system that mirrors a brain at the cosmic scale. And when you admit that, then it certainly seems like the universe was just a system trying to become self-aware all along.
My current take in the section Freedom in https://tmfow.substack.com/p/the-plurality-of-experience
This is really interesting stuff, and touches on subjects I'm including in my new book, such as the dialectic and unity of opposites, which you'll find mentioned in other posts on this site. I'm trying to grasp what you and McGilchrist mean by "the non-duality of duality and non-duality" though. Want to explain that a bit more? I ask only because I've been thinking along those lines, though that's a bit loopy. Your perspective feels pretty metamodern and resonates, but what I sense is a bit of postmodern ideology that is overly suspicious of ideas about final states and grand narratives, when I think the true answer to reality is seeing what I'm calling "the grand narrative of existence" or maybe "the grandest narrative," which is this natural cosmic teleology that leads to a self-aware universe. I think it's the most mind blowing idea ever and what everything is pointing to, but because the Enlightenment era philosophy of progress became associated with bad things like environmental harm, colonialism, and eugenics, academics became opposed to the whole idea. So the attempt to tell the same story, but to get rid of the final destination or teleology by framing it the way you are wanting to above, the Bergson way, to me seems to just be appealing to postmodernists who don't need to be catered to because they were wrong. There are dangers to hierarchies and not taking into account subjectivity and relativism, and postmodernism served a purpose because it pointed out the blind spots. That's the power of the dialectic. But I think the metamodern view is a return to the grand narrative but with a process ontology and an ontology that "reality is relational," all while still seeing that the story is one of cosmic awakening. Hope that makes sense.
I really appreciate the in-depth comments, thank you! I will talk to my understanding and usage of the quote in the context it is used: As is the main topic of that essay, the tension/continuum/whole precedes any polarities/divisions/parts we abstract from it in the course of our epistemic endeavors. The view I am outlining also holds to holism, so the tension/continuum/whole is more than the sum of the parts, and as such it cannot be recovered from the parts. But the parts, though «only» abstractions of the whole, are also in and of reality, and they matter immensely through our engagement with them. As such, for the whole and its parts, it is not a case of «either/or», but «both/and». This «both/and» of the parts and the whole they are parts of is the non-duality of duality (parts) and non-duality (whole). I don’t know if this makes it clearer.
My current understanding and philosophy is hard to condense into a brief comment, but I can try to say something that touches on «cosmic awareness»: my view is that reality is in or of experience (I argue for why I prefer the term experience over e.g. consciousness or mind in the essay Experience and Immersion). Experience is the only «given», the stage on which our world takes place, all our memories, knowledge, feelings, actions etc. The narrative that our experience is secondary to a physical universe is a narrative I view as inverted. My current take is also that «grand narratives» play into this inversion (but I do not at present exclude narratives completely, I’ll have to think more about them). Because reality is in experience already, the cosmos is already aware. As experiencers we co-operatively make reality, and we make it in such a way that is coherent, thus orderly, and we in part conceive this orderliness as preceding our experience of it, which opens up the path of the inversion. The bottom line is, in my view, the cosmos is already fully experiential (aware), it is just that we are still deeply locked into narratives and explanations that lead us to think otherwise.
I don’t know if this makes sense to you or not, and I do realize this philosophy might seem «out there». I’m currently working on an essay that summarizes this view further (tentatively named Holistic Panenexperientialism), but another «summary» is this: https://tmfow.substack.com/p/a-view-of-reality-as-a-whole
The Introduction may also be an entry point: https://tmfow.substack.com/p/introduction
Great article! Definitely some interesting concepts that could be elaborated on more in-depth (this would be a great subject for a book) but very well-written synthesis!
Thanks a lot Lee — I do plan for much of this to go in the book I'm working on now!
Love your post. We're on the same path. I just came off of last week's Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson. I submitted an abstract for a concurrent session on applying systems science to integrate scientific, philosophical, and spiritual approaches to consciousness. I listed it under the topic area of "Physical and Biologicial Sciences -- Complexity" but I added a note saying that they could stick me anywhere. They put me into "Free Will and Determinism." At first I thought, "Ugh." But then I thought, "Perfect!" One ppt says: Every system in existence is anticipating and organizing within an its continually organizing environment. We require and seek energy and information to exist (determined). To do that, we humans reason, imagine, remember, and create within complex networks of human activity (free will).
And then you write this post. . .
You are lucky you got to attend! I hope to in the future. Your work sounds really interesting and in line with mine. Definitely feels synchronistic. If you have a substack I'd be happy to recommend it.
Good essay!
"Then, the conscious mind selects from that new menu of possibilities. This selection process could be said to represent free will."
But isn't that selection from a menu the very thing free will is supposed to be about? What makes us pick one or the other? The question arises every time we speak of "choice".
My canonical example for free will is when I've already decided to have soup for dinner and am standing in front of my pantry looking at the four or five varieties of soup I have trying to decide which to eat. The decision is essentially consequence-free -- I can't make a "mistake" (because I like them all) -- so it seems ideal for considering exactly how I pick one. With a key question: if we could roll back the universe to that same point, would I always end up making the same choice? If I lack free will, I do.
I agree that chaos and the inability of starting states to have enough information to fully predict later states leads to a more novel world than one that's fully deterministic. But it says nothing about how we *navigate* among those novelties, which is where free will matters. It doesn't address the *mechanism* of free will. FWIW, I think it has to do with how our minds can have multiple and mixed thoughts about something (an extreme example being love/hate). Presented with multiple possible futures we imagine, one of them somehow "wins".
As for self-organization, isn't it interesting that in a universe where entropy ultimately always wins, the fundamental rules allow for the formation of incredible complexity? Just add energy and lots of time.
The concept of being free means that which is without initiation, motivation or influence. There is nothing on this planet that is without influence. Everything that moves has an initiation and everything in existence is motivated by an exterior force or forces. The ability of human beings to arrive at decisions is fully dependent on specific experiences, educations and predictabilities. My challenge to you is to find that which is free from influences. Fron this point of view all of your interests, concerns, worries, predictions and comparisons are completely dependent on your history for which you have no credit, nor can you be blamed for your behavior. Our world does not allow for prevention, nor does it adequately provide human beings with the necessary tools for socialization and cooperation. Predetermination is an assumption and an unnecessary characteristic for understanding the nonexistence of free will.
I love your work so much, Bobby. I believe individual self-realization is intertwined with collective self-realization, and ultimately, universal self-realization is possible. I don't know what that means because it's over the horizon imo, but I believe we need to figure out how to come together as a civilization to walk that path and find out.
Very nice summary of the relationship between randomness and free will. However, it works only if a mind-body dualism is assumed, because otherwise there couldn't be a distinction between an agent making a choice and the randomness in Nature and, thereby, would lead to a random behavior as well. You might like to read my article on this here: https://doi.org/10.53765/20512201.30.5.032
"In the early 1900s, physicist Edward Lorenz showed that all “chaotic” systems..." - Actually in the 1950s/60s.
Apart from this minor point, I love this piece!
Yes you're right!