The Barren Desolate Wasteland of Superdeterminism

From: Joe Dees (joedees@addall.com)
Date: Wed Jan 23 2002 - 06:06:49 GMT

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From: "Joe Dees" <joedees@addall.com>
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Subject: The Barren Desolate Wasteland of Superdeterminism
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    ('binary' encoding is not supported, stored as-is) These three terms are inextricably linked; free will, self-consciousness, and meaning. In the absence of the ability to choose and to efficiently act upon choice, it is impossible to comprehend how evolution could select the ability to more profitably choose, and as that is exactly what the reflective distance conferred by self-consciousness permits, there could be no reason for such a sterile and impotent faculty to evolve. Likewise with meaning. Meaning is meadiately (through self-consciousness) dependent upon choice. Preferences can only be real if they can result in action that chooses between them, and they can only be real if the alternatives they choose between mean different things, for conscious self-awarenesses. In the absence of choice and the ability to act to achieve one's choice, nothing can mean anything more or less than anything else, which pretty much kills memetics as a discipline, and just about every other aspect of human endeavor. We would be left!
     with the nonalternative that nothing means anything, not Buddhism, not Islam not any religion, not science, not anything. Such a doctrine leads in an exigent and necessary lockstep to the death of value, and in fact, to the conclusion that value was never born. Further than that, it leads to the conclusion that self0consciousness, value and meaning are even less than illusions, for there remains nothing to be deluded, and no right or wrong, and no reason to value astronomy over astrology, or religion over science, for right and wrong cannot exist. But neither can any meaning; any semantics. All the communications which humans have bounced off each other since time immemorial have been meaningless, and have been forordained, by nothing but the happenstance structure of the Big Bang genesis, since the cosmos' beginning. All of this is, of course, directly contradicted by the existence and nature of personal experience, which conclusively deposits the faith-based doctrine!
     of superdeterminism into the dustbin of fallacious religious beliefs.

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