[Fis] it from bit--ERIC WERNER - Free will

[Roy Morrison]

The brainless tiny Box Jelly Fish has been shown to learn quickly to respond to changes made that confuses its ability to avoid colliding with the sides of a glass tank.Apparently it has a number of dispersed  sensing organs that  share information and effectively learn and collectively respond unconsciously/consciously/pseudo consciously.
My daughter in law, Meagan Simons at U Michigan studying wasps found that one species of wasps clearly recognized one another from facial patterns.

There are enormous capabilities that continuously emerge from living systems evolving and responding, that learn and bubble up into behavior /consciousness.
I watched an octopus in a tank clearly playing with a handler. There is an amazing movie about relationship between diver and octopus. There is also story of fisherman who rescued a great white shark hopelessly tangled in  fishing lines. The shark responded by rolling onto her back to be petted and returned for days to be near the fishman and be stroked. We should not be surprised. 
Apparently the evolved underlying capability of living systems to learn and respond and react and share evolving  emotional mechanisms  is enormous.The base line of possibility and prospect is far more powerful and is the foundation of complex brain mediated behavior. Beneath the self-consciousness of our brain is a welter of events and processes from QM to chaotic dynamics and strange attractors that resolve in our conscious thought and end in our free will. 
Of course everything is determined, that is, caused, but freewill is an expression of emergence, something new under the sun.New-ness maybe personal, rooted on personal response to circumstance and learning and rule breaking/rule changing. Epistemology drives the ontological changes. The perfect platonic world of forms is essentially unstable
That's the fundamental difference between a crystal and a jelly fish. The crystal follows physical rules but cannot learn or evolve. The jelly fish follows physical rules but can learn and evolve and as life is open to emergent change.
This is a fundamental problem for reductionism and information theory and closed sets.
I am poor sub sub social theorist, but it is worth remembering that there is potential for human species of billions interconnected by a welter of group and individual technologies represents the ability for enormous quick changes. The collective power of these and prospects for a swiftly emergent future should not be underestimated. 
It's interconnectedness and communication not LLM teaching people that let machines think for us that will rock the world.
My next book will be:  An Ecological Civilization: We Create the Path as We Travel
Roy



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