Western Civilization Favors Free Choice Manifesto

Western civilization favors free choice compassion over government coerced compassion while China and other countries still favor government coerced compassion over Western civilization's free choice of compassion. However, clearly the individual free choices of capitalism incentivize human prosperity while the coerced social responsibility of compassion do the opposite.

Prosperity comes from the incentives of individual free choice while social control and government coercion deincentivize human initiative and therefore prosperity as well. Marx in his Communist Manifesto encouraged revolutionary social control by a compassionate elite and many argue even today that it is only government coercion by an elite party that will deliver outcomes like universal healthcare and guaranteed employment.

Free choices to invest your own limited resources into any of education health care, leisure travel, and so on, is an equitable way to distribute the limited resources of an individual. In contrast, the ideology of government coercion by an elite rations those limited resources and picks winners and losers. Slavoj Zizek argues in his The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto that the growth of capitalism has resulted in the historical deadlock of Marxism. In fact, Zizek argues that even though capitalism has had and continues to have repeated crises, capitalism emerges from each crisis stronger and not weaker. As a result, Zizek concludes that capitalism is much more resilient than Marx ever supposed it would be.

Correspondingly, Communism and Marxism are much less resilient than Marx ever supposed. Communism and Marxism also go through repeated crises, but in contrast to capitalism, Marxism emerges from each crisis weaker and not stronger. This is fundamentally because government coercion does not deal well with the anxieties and emotions of unknown risks, which are the cause of most crises. Despite the many dismal failures of prosperity under Marxism, there is an enduring modernist Marxist view that the current historical epoch of selfish free choice capitalism will eventually end. However, Marx argued in 1848 that only when civilization develops a more coerced compassion enforced by an elite to eliminate the selfish individual free choice of capitalism.

A key Marxist notion is the labor theory of value where the profit of selfish capitalism necessarily exploits labor and there is a struggle between capital and labor. Marx argued that government should own all resources and distribute the profit of labor equitably among all people. Government should then distribute all property and wealth and replace the free choice of selfish private ownership with the coerced compassionate choice of government ownership. Of course, government is also a hierarchy of competencies as Jordan Peterson notes in his classic 2018 debate with Zizek in Toronto, CA. The many flaws Marx noted of capitalism are flaws of human nature and not really capitalism.

In other words, capitalism is both selfish as well as compassionate because capitalism makes up the same hierarchies of competency that make up any civilization. The free choices of capitalism between selfishness and compassion give anyone that free choice. A coerced choice of compassion, then, is simply a limit on individual free choice. Civilization already limits free choice, but the modernist allure of Marxism supposes the need for many more limits for individual free choice enforced by some elite minority.

Covid and the Free Choice Manifesto

The Free Choice Manifesto is all about a trade-off between a selfish individual free choice and a compassionate socially responsible coerced choice. Compassion is an emotion that promotes bonding between people while selfishness is an emotion that promotes conflict between people. Both compassion and selfishness are necessary emotions for survival, but the balance between compassion and selfishness is a never ending dialog. While Marx's Communist Manifesto represents an extreme compassion of the Chinese government to coerce social responsibility, in contrast, the Western individual Free Choice Manifesto represents selfish individual free choice.

The Covid shutdown is an example of government coerced choice justified by the compassion of social responsibility in limiting the Covid spread. The coerced Covid shutdown tests the limits of free choice...does the social responsibility of Marx's Manifesto justify the coercion of Covid shutdown or rather does the selfish individual Free Choice Manifesto win? Some suggested that Chinese government coercion was inherently better able to control Covid than Western individual free choice.

In our discrete causal universe, things really don't happen inside of a universe of space and time, but rather the universe of space and time emerges from the universe of things that happen. The over arching universe of outcomes from precursors is the universe of things that happen and the universe of space and time emerges from things that happen. Our lives emerge along with space and time from the families of outcomes from precursors and from the unpredictable free choices that we make. Those choices all trade off the risk of an anxiety about the unknown with the pleasure of discovering knowledge about the things that happen. So free choice is not the result of life, rather life is the result of free choice. When coerced choices happen in our lives, like the Covid shutdown, we still make unpredictable free choice to obey or not based on the tradeoff of the risk of an uncertain infection with pleasure of avoiding infection.

Wisdom emerges from our classical knowledge about what we know is not false, from reason that tells us what is not true, and from quantum intuition giving us our feelings of what is uncertain. Instead of knowledge being what is true and reason telling what is therefore false, knowledge tells us only what is not false and reason tells us only what is not true, because there are also uncertainties and unknowables in knowledge and reason. Our quantum intuition is what makes free choice uncertain and unpredictable since we cannot know everything about quantum phase and therefore about how we feel. Even though every free choice outcome has a precursor feeling, there are precursor feelings that we simply cannot know and yet are still part of the universe as quantum unknowables. Thus we cannot know everything about free choice even though we often rationalize with reason our feelings after we make a free choice.

Covid is very infectious and seemed at first to also have a higher mortality than the flu. Covid models then incorrectly predicted insufficient hospital capacity and those predictions resulted in much anxiety. Models incorrectly predicted that Covid would overwhelm U.S. hospitals, but that really did not happen and was overblown. Now that we know the risks of Covid as a chronic and endemic infection, individual free choice instead of government coerced choice determines our outcomes.

People with new knowledge of the Covid hazard can now freely choose an acceptable level of risk and yet succeed in life just like people must accept risk from many other common hazards. The Free Choice Manifesto of the individual once again shows the fallacy of Marx's Communist Manifesto of government coercion. People don't first of all need government coercion to succeed, people first of all need free choice to succeed in a universe of things that happen.

Knowledge, Intuition, and Reason...What is Uncertain Is Both Not False and Not True...

Intuitive maths tells us not what is true or false, but rather intuition tells us what is uncertain is both not false and not true and therefore includes what is uncertain as well. A major feature of intuition is in the role of uncertainty and therefore wisdom and quantum intuition respects the limits of both classical knowledge and reason. While our universe is causal, it is not infinite and not infinitely divisible either. Therefore, the future is not predictable and as a result, free choice is also not predictable or predetermined.

Therefore, classical knowledge is not really about what is true, rather classical knowledge is about what is not false. Likewise, we do not reason that something is false, we reason instead that something is simply not true. In between classical knowledge and reason lies quantum intuition and wisdom brings all of classical knowledge, reason, and quantum intuition together as what can be known.

Outside of the realm of what we can know lies the quantum unknowable, which is different from things that are simply uncertain and that we only just do not yet know but can possibly know. We only have access to the unknowable uncertainty with our quantum intuition...

Free Choice Manifesto

Free Choice Manifesto
The free choice manifesto expresses first of all the universal notion what we call consciousness is equivalent to unpredictable free choice. Furthermore, the free choice manifesto states that everyone is oppressed in one way or another and unpredictable free choice is at the root of all oppression. In interactions with others, someone is the oppressor of an oppressed person in one or more very many different ways. If you voice a disagreement with someone, you become an oppressor and if someone expresses disagreement with you, they oppress you. If you shame someone, you are an oppressor and if you feel shame, someone oppresses. If you are selfish, you oppress socially responsible people and if you are socially responsible, you are likewise oppress selfish people. In other words, oppression of others sometimes results in desirable outcomes just as others oppressing you might also be desirable. Bosses oppress their workers but that work creates wealth and profit and social responsibility and so is desirable. Sick people are a burden on others and oppress those who are otherwise well, but taking on that burden is socially responsible and therefore desirable.

The history of civilization is all about oppression, but also about the emergence of free choice from the harsh misery of oppression by coerced choice. Instead of viewing civilization history as driven mainly by oppressor and oppressed, civilization is actually driven mainly by the emergence of free choice despite oppression. It is free choice that naturally brings wealth and prosperity despite some oppression from free choice. Instead of the tyranny of coerced choice from oppression, free choice gives equal opportunity and yet free choice must tolerate some unequal outcomes as a result. In the not too distant past, unequal outcomes often meant death since there were so many bad things that happened to people all of the time as a result of oppression.

Inequality is part of the human condition and yet a civilization can and does choose to enforce equality of opportunity. Equality of opportunity is part of the free choice manifesto but some inequality of outcome is also a part of the free choice manifesto. The free choice manifesto also means that people are free to say and write what they feel, but there are limitations on such free speech. Likewise free choice also means that commerce is open to new products and markets, but there are also limitations on such free free markets.

Free choice by its very nature depends more on individual freedom more than government control, but free choice allows for less individual freedom and some limited government control. After all, free choice is ultimately all about the selfish emotion dimension as well as the compassion dimension of a social responsibility.

Allure of the Social Responsibility of Marx's Manifesto
Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels published the Communist Manifesto in 1848, which established a plan for an inevitable global communism, the ultimate compassion of social responsibility. The manifesto did not even mention the failure of the very first communism of the first Paris Commune of 1792 or why that first communism failed so badly. In fact, every subsequent experiment with the Manifesto social responsibility has also failed, but the Manifesto allure returns once again. In these times of majority wealth, the wealthy majority vilifies a selfish elite minority instead of the wealthy majority. After the second Paris Commune in 1871, Marx and Engels added an appendix to the Manifesto praising the goals of the second Paris Commune, which they considered to be an incomplete communism with the Manifesto plan, but still did not mention the failure of the first communism. The Manifesto never did mention the failure of the first Paris commune but argued that all the second Paris Commune needed was to have taken over the military and vilify and eliminate the elite wealthy minority. After all, the military at the behest of the wealthy elite ended the second Paris commune.

The current Manifesto allure of class warfare once again shows up in our politics. Politicians once again decry inequality of both opportunity and outcome and call for all out class warfare between an oppressed majority and an oppressor minority as the root of all misery and injustice. The Manifesto states that profit and wealth do not belong not to the minority wealthy. The manifesto argues that all wealth belongs to the government and not to the minority who earn that wealth and the government should redistribute that wealth equally to all consumers and workers.

The Manifesto further argues that once an all powerful government removes the incentives of wealth inequality, everyone will somehow benefit from the lack of wealth incentives. However, while the Manifesto discusses at some length the corruption of wealth and profit, the Manifesto does not discuss the undeniable corruption of big government. In fact, the Manifesto never mentions anything about human nature and the large natural variation in human abilities and competencies. Human nature can and does after all corrupt any human enterprise and in fact, social responsibility can corrupt just as much as selfishness. The incentives of selfishness over profit and wealth provide incentives for innovation and innovation and incentives are the key to economic growth as well as the creation of new wealth and social responsibility. In a consumer economy, economic growth is due to both population growth as well as to innovation and an economy with zero population growth must have innovation to grow.

The Manifesto argues that profit and wealth inevitably corrupt the elite minority at the expense of the majority workers and consumers. However, the Manifesto does not ever mention the likewise inevitable corruption of big government, which is an elite minority in power, by the same profit and wealth from the majority workers and consumers. The Manifesto plan in fact resulted in corrupt governments and gave Russia Stalin, China Mao, Vietnam Ho Chi Minh, Cuba Castro, Cambodia Pol Pot, and Venezuela Chavez. In every case, the tyranny of corrupt big government enforced a kind of socially responsible economic equality at the expense of any selfish individual free choice.

George Orwell's Animal Farm in 1945 painted a very bleak portrait of Stalin's Russia but Orwell still supported the Manifesto socialism his whole life. Orwell still believed in the Manifesto even though his later work Nineteen-Eighty-Four in 1949 further showed his disdain for totalitarianism. Despite the ever growing number of totalitarians in modern China that result from the Manifesto plan, government corruption turns out to be by far even more insidious and pernicious than elite corruption. This is because big governments always claim the virtue and morality of social responsibility and essentially eliminate any opposition by incarceration or death.

Inequality is part of human nature and so there is no such thing as an equal outcome economy without corruption...there are only better or worse economies with equal opportunity, but never equal outcomes. In fact, a healthy economy must tolerate a certain amount of inequality in order to allow individual free choice, which is essential for innovation and change. Unfortunately, free choice also means that people are free to make poorer choices as well as better choices, but that is the nature of the Free Choice Manifesto.

Conscious Free Choice and AI

The very essence of conscious free choice is first of all the freedom to choose an outcome based on feeling and not on coercion or even reason. Therefore, conscious free choice is a very good definition for conscious action because conscious free choice has a simple meaning as opposed to the many complex and contradictory meanings for consciousness. For example, there is a medical definition and all kinds of tests to affirm a conscious state having to do with the thalamus. At the root of all medical tests, though, is still the action of conscious free choice. In contrast, the term consciousness has broader psychological, philosophical, religious, mystical, and neuro-scientific meanings that seem to be beyond action. As a result, the concept consciousness is much less useful while the simplicity of conscious free choice makes it a very useful definition of conscious action.

Artificial intelligence has choice determined by algorithms and so AI choice is not free choice. Unless AI has a feeling driven by emotion, there is no possibility for conscious free choice. Conscious free choice is most apparent with the issue of free will, but there are many descriptions about the hard problem of consciousness that do not seem to involve free choice. Some people describe consciousness as self-awareness or introspection while others define consciousness with a set of questions and answers like the Turing test. Others say that how we feel about seeing the color red as qualia is consciousness and different from the fact of something that is red.

Philosophical zombies are hypothetical people without consciousness, but with otherwise normal behavior including conscious free choice. People argue that just the possibility of philosophical zombies shows consciousness as distinct from the machine of the brain. However, since people freely choose to think about philosophical zombies simply means that they are conscious. People also freely choose to think about the color red and so all of these descriptions of consciousness all are all equivalent to conscious free choice. Philosophical zombies look and act like conscious people, but have no consciousness. Since a philosophical zombie does have conscious free choice, such a zombie would then be as conscious as anyone else.

After all, people make free choices based on feeling and not really based on rational thought at all. Free choice outcomes are often then rationalized afterwards in spite of the lack of any rational precursor for free choice. Furthermore, the persuasion of another person can strongly affect a free choice. Persuasion can certainly affect how a person feels and therefore can affect a free choice, but that does not change the mysterious nature of free choice.

There are many people who claim that they somehow know the world is determinate and so that there are really no conscious free choices. They argue that the mind is a neural machine and that free choice is simply a result of the mind machine inputs and so not free at all. Even when free choice comes from feeling, determinism argues that the free choice was always a fated outcome and so that people simply have the illusion of free choice. Science very often makes the claim that free choice is an illusion of an otherwise determinate universe despite the fact that science does not have a measurement of free choice. Science admits that quantum superposition exists and limits the certainty of any measurement. Therefore, it seems especially perplexing that science makes any claims about free choice without a measurement of free choice.

A free choice outcome based on feeling does not have completely knowable precursors. In other words, we simply do not always know for certain why we feel that way that we do. In fact, we cannot predict free choice since free choice depends on feeling and we cannot always predict how we feel, either.

Artificial intelligence is often cited as a form of consciousness since AI makes choices in games like Chess or Go. However, AI is based on deep learning and so each choice of an outcome has completely knowable precursors. Moreover, neural emotion and feeling were not involved in AI choice, although one version of the deep learning process did involve competing policy and value networks. While policy played with more probability to win by as much as possible, value played with lower risk to win as simply as possible by one piece. Later versions simply played the computer against itself and so learned to choose moves from scratch over time to make better and better choices using both value and policy for both sides.

The AI computer is then all about choices with more or less risk, but not free choice since there is no neural emotion or feeling involved, just completely knowable machine logic precursors. Free choice also involves more or less risk, but with neural emotion and feeling. Feeling simply does not have completely knowable precursors, which makes free choice different from machine choice.

Now suppose the machine used quantum superposition as part of its decisions. With quantum superposition, the machine would now have free choices that would be as unpredictable as neural free choice and therefore also involve unknowable precursors. Quantum computers would then be the first true AI and should then be conscious with complex emotions and feelings. The AI emotions and feelings would then be as difficult to understand as are human or animal emotions and feelings.

McTaggart Dynamic A and Static B Times

The Scottish philosopher John McTaggart described two different theories for time. His A time was a dynamic time that flowed from past to a knife edge present into an indeterminate future. McTaggart argued that this A time could not be real since the infinity of present moments was inconsistent with any past or future moments.

McTaggart then supposed a B time that was a static instead of flowing time with a series of determinate future moments that already exist like a videotape waiting to be played. Ironically, McTaggart concluded that neither theory of time was valid and so that time was therefore not actually a part of reality. Reality was, rather, timeless and changeless despite our experience and memory of change.

Emily Thomas has recent essay in Aeon discusses McTaggart theories, but she does not really say if she agreed with McTaggart. Rather, she is more interested in McTaggart’s motivation in describing time in the ways that he did.

Of course, time has many very different definitions and many different people have struggled for a long time to define time. One of the difficulties of defining time is that a definition of time necessarily occurs in the same time that the definition tries to define. However, instead of first defining time as an independent dimension, it is important to first define the nature of physical reality. Since we do experience changes in a seemingly static world of matter, it is clear that time somehow must emerge from matter changes in physical reality. Furthermore, those matter changes are causally related to each other as precursors and outcomes and changes therefore have relationships to one another from which time then emerges.

Change seems to occur as a dynamic reality not unlike A time and this dynamic change seems to likewise occur in a backdrop of a seemingly static reality of matter, much like B time. These two realities indeed seem reminiscent of McTaggart’s time definitions and so there are actually two dimensions for matter-action time. The static reality really just represents very slow changes since the universe changes only very slowly. This very slow time is then universe time and differs from the dynamic or very fast atomic time, which changes on the order of the speed of light.

This two dimensional matter-action time means that there are two kinds of changes in physical reality and the two time dimensions emerge that are not the same. Our feeling of time then emerges from changes that we remember and so those changes do not occur in time. There are very slow changes along with very fast changes and so there are two different time dimensions that emerge from the nature of physical reality.

Light exchange is the glue that holds matter together and both space and time then emerge from that light exchange. While the speed of light does not depend on the velocity of its source, light does accelerate very slowly over the very slow universe time. Quantum gravity relativity emerges from the very slow acceleration of light, which makes gravity relativity seem determinate, while quantum charge emerges from the very fast speed of light. While the very slow acceleration of light binds neutral matter with light exchange, the very fast speed of light binds charge with light exchange.

The Scottish philosopher John McTaggart described two different theories for time. His A time was a dynamic time that flowed from past to a knife edge present into an indeterminate future. McTaggart argued that this A time could not be real since the infinity of present moments was inconsistent with the past and future moments.