Here I will advance my argument for total determinism in a physical reality. Initial statements can be found in my entry Choice in Static Spacetime.
I have already proposed the concept of a choice block, but given quantum indeterminacy (which is unlikely to play a role in systems that operate on electromagnetic scales, such as living organisms on Earth, but nevermind that), I must also address the possible existence of chance blocks - units of cognition whose output is only probabilistically tied to input. It is true that I dismissed the usefulness of a probabilistic block in my initial post and it may still apply to sufficiently simple systems, but I have come to a realization that evolution may have allowed probabilistic blocks in sufficiently complex systems because they allow for greater flexibility and adaptability than rigid cause-effect loops might.
If a system consisting only of choice blocks can be called certainty engine and a system consisting only of chance blocks - chaos engine, then a system of successfully integrated choice and chance blocks can be referred to as an adaptation engine.
As the name implies, chance blocks can be helpful in the sense that they can allow a single stimulus to illicit any number of potential responses, rather than one. For example, genes of a primitive cell might have benefited by creating a probabilistic, opportunistic feeding pattern even if it initially amounts to no improvement. Say there is an environment that only has nutrient A and there are two types of microbes in it. Microbes 1 have a certainty-engine-like setup which instructs them to "eat A when encountered"; microbes 2, on the other hand, are very much like type 1, except their feeding system instructs them to "eat whatever". Given only A being available, both microbes do equally well. The difference, beneficial or detrimental, can only express itself if a new nutrient B appears in the environment. If it is of higher value, type 2 will do better, even if they consume B one time out of a hundred. Over time, type 2's lack of any real preference may mutate to selection of B specifically etc, etc. Bottom line is that evolution would make sure that the systems that exploit their environment best are selected for and just maybe systems that can utilize some freedom achieve better exploitation capabilities (at least a part of such beings at least a part of the time), even if this freedom comes at the price of being random.
A similar situation can then be extrapolated to an immensely more complex system such as the human brain. The brain has, at least initially, a large number of redundancies - all neurons are hardly required to perform the tasks a toddler is exposed to. It is entirely possible that the brain operates as an adaptation engine, or at least, has competitive adaptation modules alongside certainty modules. So a brain develops and a mature mind is simulated on it. While development of the brain and thus development of a rudimentary mind can be entirely deterministic and could be seriously undermined by possible detours in indeterminacy (detrimental mutations and developmental errors come to mind), it seems to me that once a certain threshold of cognitive self-sufficiency is achieved, there opens a possibility to entertain non-deterministic, non-causal states and relationships in the mind.
The quantum of thought is a think.
For example, the male primate mind has evolutionarily honed perception of beauty, a reflection of characteristics in the female form preference for which over the millenia has allowed the primate to end up existing now and having an unbroken chain of ancestors that have successfully reproduced. This beauty recognition module is very useful for picking out fertile partners, but it can also serve another purpose - imagination. The brain can arrange for stimuli to be ran through the sieve of beauty-recognition, even subconsciously, only to trigger the conscious ah-hah! feeling of recognition when a suitable match, one out of many, hits the beauty-recognizor just right. But where do the randomly (or not?) stimuli in the brain come from? No need to postulate any metaphysical injection; two mechanisms can completely account for appearance of novel patterns within a pattern-space. Evolution and quantum indeterminacy.
Evolution and quantum indeterminacy are all that is required to explain creativity.
If we assume that the human brain can internally re-perceive sensory stimuli (and we subjectively know this to be true - we have memories), then the only thing necessary for a sort of think-evolution to begin is a margin of error in these re-perceptions (and we are sure of this as well - our memories are not 100% percent accurate). The selective pressure that would drive think-evolution would be the biologically evolved brain architecture - preference for internal consistency and congruence with existing world-view, natural rewards for thinks that are interesting, pleasing etc. Furthermore, quantum effects could inject noise in re-perceptions which would be subjectively indistinguishable from faults in memory - a blue car would suddenly be remembered as black, a phrase would come to contain an additional word etc. Mutation, recombination and a fitness-driving environment are what make new, previously unimaginable complexity spring from simple first principles.
To recap: Human minds are most likely adaptation-engines - built from a precarious mixture of choice and chance blocks, allowing even a totally random input result in a normalized, adapted output: a random firing in the brain due to a 1/1000'000 radioactive decay event does not cause a catastrophic think-catastrophe since the activity in the singe neuron is dampened, modulated and re-configured by the response from all other neurons to create abstract art.
I know this one was a mess, I'm sorry :D
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