As the Anthropocene is all about us it can be difficult for us to see past our own mental constructs to more clearly envision this world circa 2100, where we/ourselves will be required to change/adapt to our coming reality. Just as today, few cry for the loss of Archaic Homo Sapiens, or his culture; by 2100 no one will be overly concerned about the generally self-inflicted changes that will be naturally selected so that neo-mankind, and our socio-economic systems, can adapt to that coming reality. While evolution typically takes millennia to accumulate even a few changes to our genic make-up; by 2100 information age technologies including: cyborg & cybernetic technologies, gene therapy and most importantly artificial intelligence; will allow for an acceleration of natural evolution on the decadal scale.
A cyborg can be defined as a cybernetic organism and per Wikipedia: "More broadly, the full term "cybernetic organism" is used to describe larger networks of communication and control. For example, cities, networks of roads, networks of software, corporations, markets, governments, and the collection of these things together. A corporation can be considered as an artificial intelligence that makes use of replaceable human components to function. People at all ranks can be considered replaceable agents of their functionally intelligent government institutions, whether such a view is desirable or not." Therefore, in the following I will use the term Holoborg instead of "neo-mankind" as any general holographic cybernetic organism (from corporations to cyborgs) and I begin a long-winded discussion of a Holoborg interpretation of the universe by quoting from Musser (2015):
George Musser (September 2015), "Is the Cosmos Random?", Scientific American, Vol. 313, No. 3
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-einstein-really-thought-about-quantum-mechanics/Extract: ""I, at any rate, am convinced that He is not playing at dice." Albert Einstein wrote to a colleague in 1926. Repeated over the years, his sound bite became the quintessential put-down of quantum mechanics and its embrace of randomness.
Close examination, though, reveals that Einstein did not reject quantum mechanics or its indeterminism, although he did think – solid scientific reasons – that the randomness could not be a fundamental feature of nature.
Today many philosophers argue that physics is both indeterministic and deterministic, depending on the level of reality being considered.
This view dissolves the much debated dilemma between determinism and free will. Even if everything that particles do is preordained, the choices we make can be completely open because the low-level laws governing particles are not the same as the high-level laws governing human consciousness.
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To be sure, List's arguments do not explain free will fully. The hierarchy of levels opens up space for free will by separating psychology from physics and giving us the opportunity to do the unexpected. But we have to seize the opportunity. If, for example, we made every decision on a coin toss, that would still count as macroindeterminism but would hardly qualify as free will in any meaningful sense. Some people's decision making may be so debilitated that they cannot be said to act freely.
This way of thinking about determinism also makes sense of an interpretation of quantum theory that developed in the years after Einstein's death in 1955: the many-worlds interpretation.
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"There is not true randomness in the cosmos, but things can appear random in the eye of the beholder," says cosmologist Max Tegmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a prominent proponent of this view. "The randomness reflects your inability to self-locate."
That is very similar to saying that a die or brain could be constructed from any one of countless atomic configurations. The configurations might be individually deterministic, but because we cannot know which one corresponds to our die or our brain, we have to think of the outcome as indeterministic. Thus, parallel universes are not some exotic idea out there in the cosmos. Our body and brain are little multiverses, and it is the multiplicity of possibility that endows us with freedom."
While the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, results in exactly the same mathematical projections as the Many-World's interpretation, it makes use the somewhat arbitrary/mystical concept that quantum wave-functions collapse when observed. Here it note that when one writes the quantum wave-function equations for the universe there are no terms for time; which offers still an alternate interpretation (call it the Holoborg interpretation) of quantum theory (besides the Copenhagen & Many-World's) that the emergent human interpretation of time is actually a comparison of a smaller subset of the holographic universe to an associated incrementally larger subset of the holographic universe.
In this Holoborg interpretation, the information contained within, and forming, the universe is created by free will interacting with other free will (rather than free will being an emergent property as in the Many-World's interpretation). In this interpretation the meaning of life would be to expand one's time horizon until one is "one-with-everything", thereby ending the illusions of time & space and maximizing one's compassion & interconnectedness. Furthermore, the hierarchy of levels creates the illusions of time & space by restricting one's understanding of the whole to a smaller subset of the holographic universe. While this restriction to a smaller subset offers the advantage of reducing confusion to one that is not prepared to acknowledge the whole, it imposes a master/slave (strong/weak) interpretation on those using the lower level subset of reality as ignorance of the whole causes the master of the subset to impose its worldview (out of ignorance), in much the same why as the cybernetic organisms (cyborgs) of government elite, religious elite, and/or corporate elite impose their wills on the masses in nations, churches and companies. As per Frederick Douglass: "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." therefore, in the Holoborg interpretation of the universe work is required in life to advance from the tyranny of small decisions associated with lower level subsets into the daylight of a more holistic world.
As a side-note, the holoberg interpretation offers a deeper understanding of the Anthropic Principle (see the following Wikipedia-link):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principleExtracts: "In astrophysics and cosmology, the anthropic principle (from Greek anthropos, meaning "human") is the philosophical consideration that observations of the physical Universe must be compatible with the conscious and sapient life that observes it. Some proponents of the anthropic principle reason that it explains why the universe has the age and the fundamental physical constants necessary to accommodate conscious life. As a result, they believe it is unremarkable that the universe's fundamental constants happen to fall within the narrow range thought to be compatible with life.
The strong anthropic principle (SAP) as explained by John D. Barrow and Frank Tipler (see variants) states that this is all the case because the universe is compelled, in some sense, to eventually have conscious and sapient life emerge within it. Some critics of the SAP argue in favor of a weak anthropic principle (WAP) similar to the one defined by Brandon Carter, which states that the universe's ostensible fine tuning is the result of selection bias: i.e., only in a universe capable of eventually supporting life will there be living beings capable of observing and reflecting upon any such fine tuning, while a universe less compatible with life will go unbeheld. Most often such arguments draw upon some notion of the multiverse for there to be a statistical population of universes to select from and from which selection bias (our observance of only this universe, apparently compatible with life) could occur.
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A common criticism of Carter's SAP is that it is an easy deus ex machina which discourages searches for physical explanations. To quote Penrose again: "it tends to be invoked by theorists whenever they do not have a good enough theory to explain the observed facts." "
Also see:
http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/cosmo/lectures/lec24.htmlBase on physicist Max Tegmark's Many-World's interpretation "Consciousness as a mathematical pattern"
So by Tegmark's Many-World's view, consciousness is an emergent phenomenon based on patterns just as wetness is emergent from the patterns of liquid particles. However, per the Holoborg interpretation, consciousness is an emergent phenomenon based on the interaction of free will in a timeless holographic universe.
To gain a better understanding of a holographic universe, see the following Wikipedia link to an article on the Holographic Principle:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principleExtract: "The holographic principle is a property of string theories and a supposed property of quantum gravity that states that the description of a volume of space can be thought of as encoded on a boundary to the region—preferably a light-like boundary like a gravitational horizon. First proposed by Gerard 't Hooft, it was given a precise string-theory interpretation by Leonard Susskind who combined his ideas with previous ones of 't Hooft and Charles Thorn. As pointed out by Raphael Bousso, Thorn observed in 1978 that string theory admits a lower-dimensional description in which gravity emerges from it in what would now be called a holographic way.
In a larger sense, the theory suggests that the entire universe can be seen as a two-dimensional information on the cosmological horizon, such that the three dimensions we observe are an effective description only at macroscopic scales and at low energies. Cosmological holography has not been made mathematically precise, partly because the particle horizon has a non-zero area and grows with time."