Does determinism breed complex ontologies?

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I ask because, when I really think about the implications of strict determinism several consequences come about that really solidify higher order dynamics into very tangible 'things'.

A couple examples of what I mean:

a) Unless bereft of intelligence a person can't not learn from a situation. If their faculties aren't in order they may draw some pretty sloppy heuristics or misconnect the dots. The behavior could either be highly adaptive or only partly adaptive based on their degree of parsing and organizing.

b) Thoughts themselves, as well as what Dawkins has often referred to as memes, seem to be very real things that move through living systems and in our case we notice these traveling across societies. That's not a new thing when you consider Sun Tzu's understanding of it and the late 1830's coining of the phrase that 'the pen is mightier than the sword'. Still - in a universe where free will is an experientially persuasive phenomena that seems to rapidly vanish under examination it becomes all the more clear how tangible ideas really are, almost like Newtonian mechanisms that reach across and often even ignore physical boundaries.

This is part of why tend not to shy away from the Jungian stuff and metaphysical ideas - the more I think about with relatively fixed structures in space-time having relatively Newtonian interactions with one another it shouldn't seem surprising that higher and higher layers of complexity emerge and that those emergent layers speak for themselves in important ways.

I don't want to derail this post right in the OP but to put it mildly I can see where it's debatable that both emergent patterns and their substrates are of equal importance, particularly to things that equally wouldn't exist without both - ie. the higher orders of complexities aren't ephemeral or unimportant at all.

This is a very interesting line of thought. In my mind it connects naturally to a whole series of topics you have posted lately and the "ghosts" discussion.

Surely importance is an entirely subjective value judgment?
Why would any level be more important than any other?

For me the most interesting line of thought suggested by this comes at the level of transpersonal phenomena. It doesn't really matter if you view them as subjective and internally generated or objective and external -- if they have transpersonal characteristics you are in an interesting territory: archetypes, memes, etc.

Perhaps the memes are being produced by those infamous machine-elves Terrence McKenna so often discussed.

It does connect well perhaps to the Peterson and Harris debate, that's part of why I said something about not wanting to derail the thread in too direct a reference back to that. As for the ghosts discussion my opinion is still really out on what exactly built that dimension of reality. I threw out a hypothesis, more or less to jog new ways of thinking about old ideas, but anything like that admittedly runs the difficulty of only being examineable through subjective experience or the measure of information people pull in from meditative visions and the like - that's something that's historically been shied away from by precisely the fields of discipline whose involvement would be needed to publicly confirm or deny such claims - that's changing a little and to date that's still wrapped under a heavy stigma.


Subjective, sure. Strangely that's the first and foremost thing we have in this world - subjectivity. To put it this way it would be a rare person who'd say that they don't really care one way or another if humanity ceased to exist tonight and even rarer who'd say that they'd be indifferent to being pulled into a 3rd world torture prison tomorrow. When things are going bad for us its especially concrete.


Heh, among many possibilities along that line.

Determinism seems to be more of a Materialist-originated Ontology.
Dr. Rupert Sheldrake has spoken about Richard Dawkins as a very smart man, and that Sheldrake would actually agree with everything Dawkins says IF Materialism were actually true, but Sheldrake's experiments have led him to believe otherwise. Both men seem to have had very similar backgrounds in training but have gone into completely different life-paths. Materialism, due to being Reductionist, results in more of a rigid-style of Mental-Constructs.

I would even go so far as to say that Materialism is like a religion or similar to a religion if not just an out-right religion (and in context I mean that it is a rigid mental-construct due to being a fixed set of beliefs, and I have since long ago abandoned the adherence to any kind of belief-system, for once a belief has been set then it becomes one's dogma and thus part of one's ego, preferring instead to use a knowledge-expansion-system).

A belief-system then closes itself off to all challenges against its fundamentals. Its evolution or perhaps more accurately its ability to humble itself thus becomes stunted and, even though everybody can continue to learn new things and obtain more data, complex ontology does not seem to be so much about whether it is deterministic or materialistic, but simply how many «patterns» have been injected/created/identified.

I believe that lack of humility results in blinders and, regardless of how complex one makes a puzzle, any limitations upon the «philosophical-model» becomes a hindrance to a full picture (one way of metaphorically phrasing this is that a mere tree is mistaken for being an entire forest). Furthermore, Materialism still has no genuinely acceptable/logical/rational answer for the existence of thoughts/emotions. Scientific-equipment (not at the material-level anyway) does not exist which can measure either a human's or animal's specific mood/emotion/thought (such as anger, sadness, happiness, contempt, frustration, etc., although heart-rates and stress-levels can).

Some religions are in of themselves rather complex, or at least they have a lot of books, but in reading Materialist-oriented or Debunker-oriented publications, I find that they all seem to read very similarly to just about any other «Fundamentalist-Religion» literature/material that has ever been published, and it is essentially full of what I see as a bunch of circular-logic reasoning. I recently re-read/re-reviewed one of The Messiah's Open-Letters to a Promoter of Melchizedek Teachings & Keylontic Science and, regardless of how «convincing» or «scientific» sounding any particular philosophy/ontology, they can most certainly seem or sound complex or well-researched, but I shall just simply quote a portion of The Messiah's letter, followed by my own perception of how I find Materialism/Determinism to be logically flawed/erroneous...

For my own take, regardless of how «complex» any particular teachings/philosophies/ontologies/belief-systems become, they are not complete nor free from errors unless any «dogmatism» over the «laws-of-physics» has been removed. One of the core-beliefs/tenets that I find absurd about Materialistic-Medical-so-called-Science is the idea that Depression is caused by an undiscovered neurotransmitter in the brain, that they are still searching for, and there is a book mentioned from Neo-Tech publications called: «The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind» as authored by Julian Jaynes.

Before I give my own personal-review of Julian Jaynes' book, let me go back to the neuro-transmitter fallacy, for it is like the so-called medical-scientists and psychiatric-doctors of the Western-world are basically trying to find an issue with the hardware of a computer that may be causing a memory leak, even though it is an error in programming of a software-issue that is causing a memory leak or even the occasional BSoD... basically, metaphorically speaking, they keep on trying to switch out the CPUs or tamper with the CPU of a computer-system, instead of just re-programming or re-installing the software with an error-free version onto the HDD.

Back to the Bicameral-Mind; regardless of his Materialism-compatible theories, the «science» and technologies to be able to actually test and experiment any theoretical-ideas or gather more insights about any particular theory or idea is now available and accessible to much greater percentages of the world-population than before, such as via carefully designed remote-viewing protocol. Although Jaynes' book provides various useful insights, and may certainly help to advance the thought-provoking evolution of those not yet learned/studied in complex-disciplines, I am forced to question whether its views on history are entirely accurate, for there are certainly sources (whether one regards them as dubious or not) that point towards alternate/hidden/suppressed histories, such as the formerly highly advanced civilisation of Atlantis (see the Remote-Viewing uploads about Atlantis).

Consciousness: This is a «debatable/controversial» concept and called «The Hard Problem» in Materialist-oriented Science (techstep already knows this of course). Nobody can come to a real consensus on this word, but in MY own personal-terms, I now simply refer to this as one's Awareness-System or Awareness-Unit. The Messiah writes often about trying to Raise/Elevate the Consciousness of man-kind, but I would probably have to describe it as something along the lines of Advancing or Increasing or Evolving the Awareness-Abilities of one's QAS (Quantum-Awareness-System), similarly to how you might say «upgrade» a CPU to be able to run/operate at a faster cycle (such as going from 3.0GHz up into 4.0GHz instead and possibly even beyond). Most people in the world are still like Zombies to Reality (people who have studied/researched the Evidence of the Conspiracy World for many years will know what I mean by this whilst those whose knowledge is entirely main-stream will not understand this reference).

I end my perspective with the idea of perception-abilities. The human-experience only has a limited range of being able to use its biological-sensors to be able to detect reality. The human-eye cannot detect the reality of extra light-frequencies that are visible to cats at night (but just because it cannot be detected by the human-eye does not make the light-rays non-existent). The human-ear cannot detect the reality of extra sound-frequencies that are audible to dogs at any time of the day (but just because it cannot be detected by the human-ear does not mean that such a sound-frequency is non-existent). Although I will not be quoting any specific numbers for range of gamma-detection nor range of decibels that humans can see or hear, I will state for a fact that the technology does exist to be able to prove that humans can only detect an EXTREMELY SMALL percentage of all known-to-exist light/sound-frequencies, and I will also further go on to state that it is not unreasonable nor illogical or irrational to suspect or believe that additional «frequencies» of reality exist beyond what can be detected by most humans.

As someone who has read through many different publications, both Materialist/Debunker-Oriented and the «taboo» subjects of Para-Psychology that all Religions seem to treat with either Vehement-Oppositions or their own Derisions (apparently hated and/or opposed by both Conventional-Science and Main-Stream Religion), I find that there is already plenty of well-documented research-material that exists to support the idea/claim/hypothesis/theory/fact/dogma/truth/etc., that other life-forms beyond human-detection does exist, can exist, and that there are even entire other universes that make this particular material-universe seem like nothing more than a basic letter of an alphabet out of an entire language or sets of languages of the «reality» termed to be called existence (although at that point, just like is described in the Cross-Correspondences of the archives from Frederick Myers works/experiments, past a certain point of earth-detectable-frequencies, the existence-type becomes so different from the earth-life that there is simply no earth-life-equivalent-metaphor to be able to describe such types of existences as they then go far beyond and well-beyond the range of any detectable or conceivable idea/frequency that becomes something similar to your calculator not being able to display the number due to the letter E for Error showing on its screen, or a Seismograph or other detection-instrument going way off the charts, and other forms of what might be perceived as hay-wire or irrational in the material-universe).

I have «discarded» many «belief-systems» throughout my life to the point where my signature-quote says it all.

I have yet to see any evidence that added complexity makes for any sort of non-determinism.

The funny thing about this recommendation I had to read The Soul's Journey by Michael Newton is that all of his subjects under hypnosis seem to be describing something very biological. All of these beings are refining, the culture 'over there' is very hierarchical to where here we have an attitude that we should have any information you want - over there it's on a much more gated need-to-know basis. The other thing, the description of them flocking together in such ways that their communities seem to resemble plant life colonies, reporting to superiors when one dies, going through a central hub and being spun back out - so much of this sounds like the exact order we see around us in biological life carried out in a different state and accordingly with a slightly different contour to the same basic rules.

Similarly it got drummed in that one of the worldly sins that persists after death is tribalism - ie. the younger the soul the more they feel confined to their clan so to speak. The reason it would be more peaceable over there is that they only have tribalism and they seem to have very strong and ethically dedicated leadership - here we lack that leadership all too often and additionally have the fights for food, water, income, status, and one of the more expansively pernicious battles - ie. the battle for partner or even right to procreate which seems to lead to a straight-jacket conformity that no one's doings can merit them out of - ie. if they're weird they're weird and the consequences of that are permanent.

Overall though I don't see free will here and I don't see any evidence of free will on the other side of embodiment. Consciousness seems like a pressure censor wrapped in assimilated material that aids it in its balance and command of environment but ultimately it is and always will be reacting to pressures both external and internal and those pressures and their intensity relative to a person or entity's ability to keep up has a lot to do with whether they'll be a good, bad, or inept actor in that sense. That's not meant to be my case for determinism, spacetime itself I think is it's own proof.

The only being that could have free will is the being for whom all effects in existence are their production but even so - where do they get the materials for their decisions? It begs whether even the very top of the chain can choose anything, the very act of decision seems to mean external factors (or at least external to the core 'I' experience) are at play and being reacted to.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 25 Jan 2017, 5:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.

But the opposite IS manifestly true.

Non-determinism DOES require complexity.

Free will means nothing if there are no forks in the road. No options.

The more forks in the timeline the more room there is for free will, at least in theory.

I try to avoid free will because I've seen people gerrymander the definition of it all over the place.

If I understand most people's meaning of the phrase they're saying they can do what their internal impulse, poise, and identity would compel them to do without some other agency impeding them (which your example seems to fit - ie. low resolution through a poor list of options being cohersive against one's own internal impulse).

What confuses me is that internal impulse isn't really a choice. We often don't feel like there's anything nearer or dearer to call us, so we tend to own it. it still doesn't follow that our highest, dearest, or most abstract ideals or all of the abstract bits of childhood emotion and cultivated wonder that still surfaces from time to time is something we can take credit for anymore than the person a few blocks or cities over who might have absolutely terrible memories of horrific abuse and has inherited a history, present, and future of violence.

It seems like systems evolve and circumstances imprint themselves on those systems - both living and non-living, conscious or otherwise. We seem to be going along for the same ride in that sense as anything else. The one saving grace preventing people from drifting to the worst places imaginable might be that conscious life has compassion for conscious life and even that is highly imperfect.

Well...

First things first.

One problem is that while I typed that post I realized that i didnt know what the word for the "opposite" of "determinism" is.

So at one point I called it "nondeterminism", and in another sentence I used the phrase "free will" to mean the same thing.

So since you are asking us about determinism maybe you should first tell us what its opposite would be called.

Is it "free will". Or what?

Techstep, your use of the word "imprint" makes me think of the 8 circuit model used by Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson.
Part of that system is the idea of re-imprinting, after a suitable preparation (which may involve chemicals) and the ability to shift "reality tunnels."


Here's a version of the 8 circuit model combined with some other maps that I know you are intimately familiar with

Free-Willing, Determinisim, Non-Determinism, Complexity, Non-Complexity, etc.

Coming to Terms With Correct Semantics and Vocabularies: Certainly, any dialogue or discussion about a topic or subject needs to have its vocabulary properly defined, lest we spin wheels upon metaphorical-ice. I don't think complexity is determined so much by Determinism as it is more from Psychological-Evolution.

Free-Choicing: Regarding free-choice, some people are certainly more free with their choices than others, depending on their available resources. That is not to say that everyone with massive resources makes complex choices (if one does nothing but one activity for work all their lives, amasses a fortune, but their life-experiences are still somehow fixed or routine to the point of not really learning much of anything new each day, the mind remains simplistic). I remember listening to war-veterans who returned to the land of Police-State USA on some videos about how your mentality is essentially in a frozen state of perception when you're out on deployment (i.e.: your government basically never tells you anything except on a need-to-know basis so your paradigm about the world can literally be the same or fed with nothing but wrong and inaccurate information for an entire decade or two).

Many people live these hand-me-down inheritance life-styles, not really needing to do much work in their life, not being forced into nitty-gritty experiences like the rest of us who have experienced struggles for survival, and thus their decision-making abilities are undeveloped, even if they inherit a massive amount of wealth or fortune.

What Actually Seems to Breed Complexity: This, I would have to say, has more to do with life-experiences for everyone at the individualized levels, combined with willingness to learn or abandon any rigid mental-constructs, rather than any particular sets of teachings or philosophies or subjects. I find that the ability to break out of all forms of dogmatism does not happen with most people without being forced to endure a great deal of survival-pressure and somehow managing to survive through all of its trials and tribulations. Some of those Neo-Tech writings that I used to read through explained that each generation builds upon the previous, a sort of evolutionary process, one where it explained that Socrates passed down his knowledge to Plato, who in turned passed on his knowledge to Aristotle, which the writers of Neo-Tech then claimed that they also took and developed even further.

This is similar to any form of esoteric-style teachings where the quality or legitimacy or authority or credibility of the information comes from one particular lineage or another. Such is the case of many of the kung fu styles of martial arts, although most people (even in the martial arts world) are not «insiders» who learn about lineage-developed knowledge passed down from one master to the next, each successful-generation adding to the cognitive-map of knowledge & experiences from the previous generation, and generations are not necessarily limited or restricted to biological-lineages (that would be absurd for certain disciplines - not everybody wants to follow in the footsteps of their parents and it makes more sense to be able to accept and train any particular qualified apprentice anyway as a safeguard against family traditions being ended by unwilling descendants). Masters or grand-masters of any particular discipline may have their own «styles» for doing something (like Charles Bertlitz has his own teaching styles for learning languages whilst the Rosetta Stone series uses yet another style of learning and teaching). Over-all, when systematically studied in scientific-context, one finds that any form of esoteric-teaching is more like a flavour of any particular discipline (none of them are necessarily the right or the wrong way, they just use different methods to achieve the same ends, such as one health-nut maybe promoting the eating of more grapes whilst another might promote more the watermelon; both work to achieve similar results).

Conclusion: I say that it's the design of any particular «system» of knowledge itself that determines how complex a knowledge-system becomes. If a system places too many restrictions upon what can be considered valid, then it potentially limits its potential complexity (probably). Whether a system has «choices» in the matter or not, that reminds me of one's state-of-emotions at the time any particular system/ontology is created, for most of the world's social-structures or social-system-affecting structures are generally boiled down to some sets of texts that have been written down onto various pieces of papers.

The question then becomes: What was or were the cause(s)/inspiration(s) behind why the texts were structured in such a manner? You cannot talk to the sets of text and have the text respond to you due to its «inanimate» nature, and if the author had passed away, good luck trying to get ahold of said author for answers without the Western-world thinking that you must be a mentally ill schizophrenic for trying to contact the physically deceased.

The Existence of Determinism & Non-Determinism: For the TL; DR to which of these exists, I find that both are possible, and that both can and do exist simultaneously. A Deterministic-Ontology seems less-likely to me to be as likely to become as complex as a Non-Deterministic Ontology. I think the question of this thread-title might be asking for something that is not necessarily compatible with certain structures of semantics and my own «logical-reasoning» tells me that «Does determinism breed complex ontologies?» is similar to asking «Does one set of books/encyclopedias cause another set of books/encyclopedias to become more complicated?»

The only «determining/breeding» factor in my mind, regarding complexity, always requires the equation of perception-abilities, awareness-faculties, otherwise often referred to as Consciousness or the Mind's Eye.
The «mind» factor has been left out of the equation of the question, and there are other factors that affect the mind, one of them being one's emotional-state at the time of writing down text-on-paper. People of very tumultuous emotions are much less-likely to have a choice as to how they respond or behave or react or act, for anybody who has dealt with various numbers of people with extreme emotional-problems, you also see near-exact patterns of behaviour from one of them to the next (herd-mentality, group-think, etc). One abusive-alcoholic will generally make the exact same derogatory statements or treat their children in the exact same abusive manner as the next one.

Anybody who has been on the «conspiracy» side of knowledge finds that «Statists» all essentially say the EXACT SAME things as the previous 12 Statists who argue against the evidence (e.g.: «but who will build the roads?» or «but then there would be anarchy» or «that's just a conspiracy» or any other number of VERY COMMON phrases etc).

With the «Statist versus non-conformist» argument that I now bring into this discussion, I would say and consider such a thing to be evidence that Rigid-Determinism of the Mind/Conscience that compels certain people to follow «Authoritarian» trends actually deters and discourages the development of Complexity (due to its «need-to-know-basis» structure), where-as Non-Determinism of the Mind/Conscience to be able to decide and learn for itself to be able to heed its own morals/ethics for purposes of maximum chances of long-term-survival allows for and actually encourages even more Complexity to any particular resulting or spawned Ontology.

It's probably indeterminism - that's my best guess, and as far as I can tell that's essentially chaos wherever it would exist. The quantum background radiation of space very well may fit that bill but it seems like we have deterministic systems rise out of that, anything else seems to pop right back out of existence.

In a way I think I'm mostly speaking to the side of logic that tends to react to anything emergent as if it's unreal or as if its an illusion cast in the real stuff it's made of - ie. it's components. I've noticed that tendency and I think it's a logical mistake along the lines of 'the lower scale the component the more true it is'. Determinism IMHO lends a stability and framework to those components that suggests thoughts, ideas, emotions, etc.. have a mechanical value which holds unless displaced by another mechanical value and can create networks across people that are more than just metaphor.

The implication of indeterminism in human choice especially seems to suggest that nothing really holds - that anyone could have done what they wanted and that their experiences, self-impressions, and ideas they possess (or are under the possession of occasionally) are these vaporous things. It doesn't seem to work that way, one good example is crowd psychology.

I tend to think crafting mind and crafting material are almost interchangeable models. A person can be an artisan or master chef with physical ingredients the way they can be artisans or chefs with sound, words, or ideas.

Perhaps what might have helped cultivate my thinking in this direction before I really knew what I was doing with it - I spent at least eight to ten years trying make it as a drum & bass producer (shows in my screen name I'm sure). I was trying to mold ever more sophisticated ideas as I reached into myself and around a certain point, 2009 and 2010, that apexed. Part of where I got out of it and lost interest was when mastering my tunes got to be such an abrasive and perfectionistic process that the best artistic and aesthetic ideas had to be burned and thrown out the window because they didn't translate across speaker systems as well as a professional product should; that's a lot harder thing to achieve than most people realize. Either way I've had a pretty sharp and clear sense of what sound can do, what kinds of landscapes it can conjure into being, and how it can reach across contents but essentially organize them the same way - ie. like a polarized coat rack for various emotional and visual material that a person already has in their memory. If you try to just reduce that do a bass drum, a snare, or one bass or synth note it doesn't get very far - it's a structure mostly built of contexts and relationships, as is mixing.