Our striving for knowledge is a declaration of love. By gaining wisdom we are loved in return. The most basic structure of consciousness and reality deciphered and a real solution to the problem of free will. Whoever distinguishes, decides. By Claus Janew.
How to create artificial consciousness
Awareness Meditation Template (World Formula)
Click here to view the PDF slides. The center and the unfamiliar symbol are both clickable.
The Original German version is here.
How is Freedom of Choice Possible?
The question of whether we can freely choose among
several possibilities, without imagining this freedom or confusing it with
chance, leads us to the truth about our responsibility. For if we had to answer
for something that came from us but was not decided
by us, it would be no more than the responsibility of a cloud for its rain.
To find the answer, let us consider the simple choice between two continuations of our day, for example, whether to go to the cinema or to the theater. Actually, we like both equally, although sometimes we feel more like one than the other. Today, however, we really don't care; we could just as well flip a coin. But we don't - that would be too cheap. We think. We put ourselves into the cinema, then into the theater, then back into the present, and so on. In this way we circumscribe the entirety of the decision situation, the present being its center. Strictly speaking, this center is infinitely small, right in the middle of the whole circumscription with all its details. That is, in us.
What is Consciousness? (I)
Whatever consciousness "is" - it must have
structure. Even emptiness can only be defined in contrast to fullness and
non-duality versus duality (as the word says). Or it is simply "Mu".
And that would be the end of this paper - and everything else.
I suggest that we take some time with this and try to start from a consciousness that is as concrete as possible, from a conscious object, say a water glass. We perceive something that we distinguish from ourselves. We also distinguish it from its environment (table, cupboard, room) and determine it in comparison with other known things (table, cup, plate) to what it "is". That is, we circumscribe its existence by comparison. Likewise, it stabilizes itself through external and internal interactions (pouring and drinking, molecular attraction and repulsion).
Division by Zero - a playful short discussion
James Anderson* has proposed an obvious definition for the dreaded division by zero...
To ensure consistent formatting, the document is in PDF: Division by Zero
Definition of the infinitesimality structure
Multitude cannot exist without oneness, and oneness
cannot exist without being determined by multitude.
Oneness, however, means identity, and identity, in
its final consequence, through all "stages," is a zero point. On the other hand, this
infinitesimal center needs to be circumscribed by details. So, despite the details' identity in oneness, they as
individuals have to find their way into circumscription. And as individuals,
they contain infinitesimal centers by themselves, etc. Therefore, the
circumscription of such a center is a changing
between single points.
This means that an existing structure includes both
extremes: absolute identity and absolute separation. Their unity must also be constituted by change – now between the
common point of identity and separateness. Both are nothing at all without this
change, by which they are determined only. The unity built that way of oneness
and multitude in turn has its infinitesimal center of identity...
The same is
valid for every area on every scale. A continuum of this kind is the
precondition of permanent objects. Through the omnipresent change between the
extremes of identity and separation, any point is immediately joined with each other, as well as continuously mediated and also apart from the others.
Circumscription and the Center: Determinacy, Objectivity, and Authored Choice
Structural Libertarianism and the Veridicality of the “Up-to-Me” Experience: Psychophysical Openness, Authored Indeterminacy, and Residual Luck
This paper defends a libertarian account of free will grounded in the phenomenological structure of live decision episodes. Such episodes instantiate an i-structure, a center–periphery organization in which a focal node represents the decision situation as a whole and a periphery represents alternatives, reasons, and constraints. There is an “up-to-me” region in which the situation’s identity is fixed while what will be done remains open. I argue that the best interpretation of this up-to-me phenomenology, when taken as serious evidence about agency, is global metaphysical openness: even given the total state of the world and the total laws at a time, more than one future action is nomically possible. I make this explicit through a strengthened Psychophysical Openness Thesis (POT): psychophysical laws are probabilistic and sensitive to i-structures, constraining and biasing outcomes without deterministically fixing them. I then define authored indeterminacy as underdetermined settling whose explanatory stopping point is the agent’s reasons-integrating act rather than an independent chancemaker. Luck objections are addressed by conceding that global libertarianism entails irreducible bruteness and chance within the agent while arguing that responsibility does not require eliminating chance but locating irreducible settling within the agent’s evaluative act.
Center, Horizon, and “Taking a Stand”: A Phenomenological Map of Decision Episodes
This paper offers a phenomenological description of conscious decision episodes in which agents experience themselves as facing a live choice and “taking a stand.” It also argues that such a description supplies a structural supplement to existing accounts of decision and self-commitment, especially Moran’s account of avowal and Chang’s account of hard choices. Moran shows why deciding is not merely reporting an antecedent psychological fact; Chang shows why some choices are not settled by the balance of given reasons and may involve will-based reasons. What both accounts leave underdescribed, I argue, is how an agent can encounter a practical question as already determinate enough to be this decision now while the outcome remains open enough to require commitment. Drawing on Husserl’s object–horizon structure, Gurwitsch’s theme/field/margin, and James’s focus/fringe, I describe such episodes as instantiating an i-structure: a center–horizon pattern whose focal node gathers “this situation” as a unified whole while its horizon encodes considerations, constraints, and possibilities. I distinguish two gradients across this structure: identity-determinacy, concerning how settled “what this is” is, and affordance-determinacy, concerning how settled “what I can still do” is. Their divergence marks a crossing phase, whose resolution I call authored resolution: a commitment experienced as my doing, neither mandated by reasons alone nor random or alien.