On the Need for Compassionate Free Choice

Humanity uses good and evil as notions of what is right and wrong behavior, but compassion and free choice are much more useful notions for actually predicting how people act. While compassion is what tends to bond people together into cooperative families, clans, villages, cities, and countries, free choice is more often what conflicts people with each other or groups of people with other groups of people. With compassion, people cooperatively share the wealth they have acquired and with free choice, people put their own survival first and acquire wealth more for themselves.

There is a strong association between the notion of evil and the emotion of free choice, but that is a very limited useful association. People must have some free choice in order to survive and likewise, people must also have some compassion in order to bond with other people. If a people only have free choice, they accumulate wealth and may actually take wealth from other people, including the lives of other people. But people must have some free choice, a compassionate free choice, and so the absolute notions of good and evil and the emotions of love and hate are much more limited. Instead, it is the free choice of compassion and compassionate free choice that better predict how people feel about each other.

There is a long history of the emotions of love and hate and many religions tout love as the most important emotion for bonding people together. Hate as the complement to love engenders the conflicts that people have with each other and there is an ultimate evil in hate. Since hate is always undesirable, the emotions of love and hate are more limited compared to compassion and free choice for predicting how people act.

Religions usually promote various transcendent agents for good compassion and other evil agents for  free choice, but really compassion and free choice are both part of the dual representations for how the universe works; relational and Cartesian. A relational person is compassionate and relates better with and cares more about others and is therefore a person who is on a common journey with many others. A Cartesian person has more free choice and cares more about themselves than other people and free choice people are therefore more separate and alone on their own objective Cartesian journeys. Just as a relational person subjectively bonds with many other people in a common journey of compassion, Cartesian people are largely on their own objective free choice journeys and only weakly interact with other people.

The complements of each emotion form five emotion pairs that represent the basic duality of matter and action. While compassion represents the matter and bonding of feeling, free choice represents the action and conflict of the inhibition of compassion. Compassion is then the inhibition of free choice and compassion bonds people together while the excitation of free choice is action where people conflict.

In our brains, excitations and inhibitions of neural action potentials represent how we feel and form the EEG spectra of brain waves as the figure below shows.  In the spectral reality of the universe, free choices are discrete particles of neural action called aware matter that bond into larger aware matter objects called thoughts as neural packets in the brain. Thoughts resonate as the EEG spectra of the brain and are the matter or feelings that bond two people and that bonding likewise results in further matter spectra that show those relationships.

Science does not yet understand how neural action results in the EEG spectra of free choice, but sleep is a very important part of neural action. In fact, there are two primitive neural matter packets during sleep that appear in sleeping EEG called K complexes and sleep spindles. Both K complexes and sleep spindles are made of delta mode packets and the delta mode is the fundamental mode of neural action. The EEG K complex seems to be the simple delta dimer while a sleep spindle seems to be a delta dimer with an alpha mode carrier and both are the basic primitive neural packets that appear during deep sleep. These primitive neural packets appear to be what keep our mind asleep and yet they also represent the basic neural aware matter that binds or conflicts us with others as well with compassion and free choice.

Compassion and free choice are therefore the two most important emotions for bonding and conflict and people actually have both compassion and free choice in all journeys in life. Compassion and free choice are much more useful than love and hate for describing the complexity of relationships. Bonding relationships come about from pleasurable neural excitations and results in delta dimer bonds that inhibit anxiety. Conflicts among people inhibit pleasure and excite anxiety, which is the alpha carrier mode.

People always need free, a compassionate free choice, in order to survive and so there are no journeys with only free choice just as there are no journeys with only compassion. There are no people in life that are only Cartesian or only relational, there is likewise neither complete free choice nor complete compassionate…all people must act both with compassionate free choice as well as free choice compassion in order to survive. This is why love and hate are more limited complements of bonding emotions.

A Cartesian person journeys on a path that is more isolated from other people and so a Cartesian generally represents free choice that cares more about their own needs than the needs of others. In contrast, a relational person journeys as a superposition of many possible outcomes that are more bonded with others by compassion. A relational has more compassion for other people and a relational inhibits free choice. A relational person has more compassion for others that inhibits free choice for their own needs and therefore relationals are more open about the many possible outcomes with other people.

By extension of compassion and free choice to the governments of clans, villages, and states, the notions of compassion and free choice represent the cooperation and conflicts that bond and conflict people into a community with many largely anonymous people living together in large cities and countries. The constitution of a balanced government incorporates the notions of a balance of compassion and free choice to assure survival just as people freely choose assure their own survivals.

Religions have sometimes very strict guidelines for compassion and free choice and such guidelines provide religious people with purpose and meaning. States provide less rigid guidelines for compassion and free choice as compared with religion and governments therefore States often tolerate a much wider range of behavior and therefore purpose and meaning. A government ideology balances compassion and free choice and governments can show compassion as well as free choice just as people do.

Governments balance compassion, sharing, and cooperation with free choice and that balance allows competition to promote commerce and innovation. The markets of commerce permit free choice and trade for goods and services that not only meet the needs of survival, but also provide goods and services for others as well in a form of compassion. The government builds roads, transportation, buildings, parks, and social welfare represent the compassion of public resources shared for all.

What Is Nothing Like?

When we as young children begin our journey of consciousness, we discover by about age two the belief that the lonely dark nothing of empty space is something after all. That belief in the nothing of empty space anchors further discovery and helps us discover the way the world of objects works. The discovery that the nothing of space is really something not only anchors further discovery for survival, but provides purpose and meaning far beyond survival.

But we begin life by sensing objects and light, not space, and objects and light are actually what reality is all about, not really space. When we no longer sense an object, we come to believe that an empty space now exists where that object was. This belief in empty space allows us to know that the object still exists and is simply now hidden by other objects or by some distance away from us and that is why we no longer sense the object. We come to believe that space exists even though we never sense space directly and even though empty space is simply the lack of an object that is now hidden from view or sensation.

We sense objects and learn their objective properties like color, texture, mass, time delay, and so on and can agree with others about those objective properties. Each object in the universe exists with a well-defined and measurable time delay from us and various time delays from other objects. These time delays are all equivalent to spatial distances from us and other objects and that is how we keep track of objects. We use particular objects called landmarks to provide reference frames for locating other objects, but there is really never any lack of objects in our perception or even anywhere in the universe. In other words, the notions that we have about continuous empty space and time are just that...convenient notions that help us to keep track of objects.

There is a long history of discourse in philosophy about the nature of the nothing of empty space. Why is there something rather than nothing? is a question in a recent book by philosopher Jim Holt, "Why Does the World Exist?" The history of nothing ranges from Zeno in ancient Greece up through modern times with Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. Since we neither sense nor measure the nothing of empty space, there is actually no way to answer such an inexplicable question and this book simply continues the endless discourse about the nature of nothing. The world is existence and so the question reduces to the identity of existence existing and the nature of this identity is obvious.

Philosophy, after all, is an endless discourse about the nature of the universe. Philosophy asks and attempts to answer many inexplicable questions since it is not always clear which questions we can answer. Why there is something rather than nothing is an existential question that has no answer other than the identity; the universe exists because it exists. There is no sense to a discourse about nothing except that nothing is a convenient way to keep track of a lack of objects. Just like the zero of our number system, the notion of the nothing of empty space provides a way of keeping track of a lack of objects of certain kinds. However, there is simply no sense to the absolute lack of all objects including a universe since the universe is what defines what exists and we are an inextricable part of the existence of that universe.

Reality exists as objects, light, and time and with discrete matter, time delay, and action; from just these three axioms all reality emerges. When we sense a red object, in addition to its red color that many others agree is red, we have feelings about that red object that are unique to us. Our unique lifetime of experience with red objects and unique development mean that the red object results in a feeling about the object that is unique for each person. It could be that the red color is an illusion, for example, or that we may see all objects as red because we happen to lack other pigments in our retina.

So it is very important for consciousness to have some kind of anchor as a belief in nothing, which is simply the belief that objects continue to exist even when we no longer see or sense them. After all, when an object hides other objects or when objects are simply out of our immediate perspective or simply be too far away to sense, we say then that there is empty space between us and some background behind where the object was. However, objects simply do not disappear and reappear according to common classical reality.

In our quantum reality, though, objects as matter waves always exist in superposition states and there is a coherent phase that somehow links their futures together. It is quantum phase coherence that provides a kind of glue that binds the universe of both charge and gravity together. Knowing the state of a matter wave provides information on the complementary coherent states of that matter wave everywhere else in the universe as well.

Although instantaneous information transfer cannot occur, quantum entanglement does make it seem like matter-wave information transfers instantaneously across the universe. However, the information about a matter wave state is simply received or felt by each of two quantum observers across the universe and those quantum observers do not transfer or communicate that information across the universe in a classical and deterministic sense of cause and effect.

If two quantum observers know about each other's complementary matter wave phase coherence, they will feel and come to know the complementary events even across the universe. However, the observers do need to know before hand about the common source that created those two events and have discovered the way the universe really works. In other words, there is a quantum bond between the two observers across the universe as a result of the coherence of a common matter wave. These two observers will then have complementary feelings about those two events that they will simply not be able to understand without a lot of prior knowledge.