Free will

• Our society’s concept of justice places responsibility in the hands of individuals and they are presumed to have free will as an axiom.
• We must avoid dangerous mind traps that result from misunderstanding our own free will, including:
  • “Everything is predetermined, so I’m not at fault for my actions.”
  • An individual’s agency is and illusion, an automatic expression of evolved patterns as unchosen historically as their current expressions are now.
  • An individual’s choices are not real and therefore not under the individual’s “control” or subject to their choosing.
  • Anxiety stemming from a deep sense of helplessness and loss of control or agency.
  • Being controlled by others due to a weak sense of one’s own agency and means of choice.
• One’s choices can be improved in choosable ways.

Streaming emergence

• Causality; No backward travel in space or time; flow sourcing from free space
• Biological evolution; Ancestry, combination, mutation, etc
• Alternated substrate stabilization and intradevelopment (see ontological layers below)
• Dependence on uniquely derived upstreams; inevitability is about the past, not the future; emergence is mediated by sorting phenomena and probabilities are refined and isolated into non-free (bound) heritages.

Ontological layers of reality

Desire as the driving direction of life’s expression at the conscious level

Functional epistemology & nature of truth

• Truth is wholly epistemic (substrate is a mind, domain is biological experience, etc.) with faithful referents in the common empirical reality.
• All truth independently originates as individuals’ epistemic phenomena are assembled through memory and organized by the “opinions” of the organizer. (These are the opinions mentioned by Aurelius and expressed as desire or wisdom.)
• Any common truth must be discovered intersubjectively and will suffer by all the defects of individual truth as well as the defects in communicative incompleteness and infidelity.
• All truth (if true) references the unitary common shared empirical reality.
• All truth is necessarily under-informed and incomplete.
• There’s no objective truth except for the entire unknowable universe if understood as itself a conscious information processing system, a curious but non-useful formulation.
• All truth is selected by a process of derived essentialism and prioritization.