Turchin on Cybernetic Epistemology/ Ontology.
"To the question `what is the thing-in- itself?' he gave a clear and precise answer: it is will. The more one thinks about this answer, the more it looks as a revelation. My will is something I know from within. It is part of my experience. Yet it is absolutely inaccessible to anybody except myself. Any external observer will know about myself whatever he can know through his sense organs. Even if he can read my thoughts and intentions -- literally, by deciphering brain signals -- he will not perceive my will. He can conclude about the existence of my will by analogy with his own. He can bend and crush my will through my body, he can kill it by killing me, but he cannot in any way perceive my will. And still my will exists. It is a thing-in-itself. What is then the rest of the world as we know it? Schopenhauer answers: a `Vorstellung'. This word was first translated into English as an `idea', and then a `representation'. Both translations are not very precise. In the Russian language we have a word for it which is a literal translation of the German `Vorstellung': `predstavleniye'. `Vorstellung' is something that is put in front of you. It is a world picture we create ourselves -- and put in front of us, so that to some extent it screens the real world. This aspect of Vorstellung is not properly reflected either in `idea' or in `representation'. Schopenhauer's formula for all that exists is: [Exists][Exists] the\ world = will + representation [Exists][Exists] \eon \node{Will} % part-of: Metaphysics In our thought and language we distinguish two different classes of elements about which we say that they exist: those expressing what we know, or think we know, and those expressing what we are striving for and intend to do. We unite the elements of the first class to referred as knowledge, and the elements of the second class as will. They are not isolated from each other. Our goals and even our wishes depend on what we know about our environment. Yet they are not determined by it in a unique way. We clearly distinguish between the range of options we have and the actual act of choosing between them. As an American philosopher noticed, no matter how carefully you examine the schedule of trains, you will not find there an indication as to where you want to go. Another way to describe the relation between will and knowledge is as a dichotomy between `I' and `not-I', or between subject and object. The border between them is defined by the phrase `I can'. Indeed, the content of my knowledge is independednt of my will in the sense that I cannot change it by simply having some intentions or preferences. On the contrary, I can change my intentions without any externally observable actions. I call it my will. It is the essense of my `I'. It is only my will, i.e. the will of the subject of knowledge, that exists as will. Its will, and their wills, if they exist (of course, they do), exist only as my representations. If Kant's view of knowledge has a clear cybernetic interpretation, then even more so has Schopenhauer's view of the world. His formula is borne out by the practice of cyberneticians during the last decades. We try to understand ourselves by building cybernetic creatures and computer programs which model intelligent behaviour. Our artificial models of intellect consist of two parts: a device that collects, stores and processes information; and a decision maker -- another device that keeps certain goals and makes choices in order to reach these goals, using the information from the first device. Thinking about ourselves in those terms we speak about knowledge and will. It is there, and there is nothing beyond it. \eon \node{Freedom} % part-of Metaphysics The concept of will assumes the existence of freedom} to exercise the will. Thus recognizing will as a cornerstone of being, we do the same for freedom. For the mechanistic worldview of the nineteenth century freedom was a misconcept, a nuisence which escaped satisfactory definition within the scientific context. For us freedom is the very essence of the things, and, first of all, of the human person. However, in many minds, science is still associated with the deterministic picture of the world, as it was in the nineteenth century. This picture, was as follows. Very small particles of matter move about in virtually empty three-dimensional space. These particles act on one another with forces which are uniquely determined by their positioning and, possibly, velocities.The forces of interaction, in their turn, uniquely determine, in accordance with Newton's laws, the subsequent movement of particles. Thus each subsequent state of the world is determined, in a unique way, by its preceding state. Determinism was an intrinsic feature of the scientific worldview of that time. In such a world there was no room for freedom: it was illusory. Humans, themselves merely aggregates of particles, had as much freedom as wound-up watch mechanisms. In the twentieth century the scientific worldview has undergone a radical change. It has turned out that subatomic physics cannot be understood within the framework of the naive realism of the nineteenth century scientists. The theory of relativity and, especially, quantum mechanics require that our worldview be based on critical philosophy, according to which all our theories and mental pictures of the world are only devices to organize and foresee our experience, and not the images of the world as it ``really'' is. Thus along with the twentieth-century's specific discoveries in the physics of the microworld, we must regard the inevitability of critical philosophy as a scientific discovery -- one of the greatest of the twentieth century. We now know that the notion that the world is ``really'' space in which small particles move along definite trajectories, is illusory: it is contradicted by experimental facts. We also know that determinism, i.e. the notion that in the last analysis all the events in the world must have specific causes, is illusory too. On the contrary, freedom, which was banned from the science of the nineteenth century as an illusion, became a part, if not the essence, of reality. There is genuine freedom in the world. When we observe it from the outside, it takes the form of quantum-mechanical unpredictability; when we observe it from w ithin, we call it our free will. We know that the reason why our behaviour is unpredictable from the outside is that we have ultimate freedom of choice. This freedom is the very essence of our personalities, the treasure of our lives. It is given us as the first element of the world we come into."