In the Formal World there is no such thing as free will – obviously there can’t be or else there be nothing ‘formal’ about it. Formal means that everything is decided in advance – it means [1] That certain conditions have been put in place and [2] That everything occurring within this conditioned domain has to conform to these conditions. There is no ‘leeway’ in the Formal World, no ‘room for uncertainty’. If there were to be any leeway, then that leeway would constitute a manifestation of ‘informality’; if there were to be room for uncertainty then that uncertainty would breach the all-important, all-defining ‘conditions’.
In the Formal World we are free to do whatever we please just so long as we satisfy the conditions, just so long as we comply with the regulations. The Formal World is the Conditional World, therefore; it is ‘the world that depends on conditions’. The only thing about this is however that when we satisfy the conditions, when we go along with the regulations, then we of course are no longer free. Freedom doesn’t give a hoot about conditions; freedom cannot be regulated. In the FW therefore, everything we do – without exception – is about following rules, is about conforming to a pattern, is about reading from the script. The Formal World is a script – the Formal World is – we might say – ‘its own description’.
The FW is – in essence – a description of a world; it is a description of the world which has no content itself, maps don’t have content… Descriptions don’t have content, they’re not supposed to – they are supposed to describe the reality, not be it! What we’re talking about here is the replacing of the real by the hyperreal, therefore we’re talking about the replacement of the actual by the analogue. In terms of the well-known Zen metaphor (as popularised by Bruce Lee), we are talking about mistaking the pointing finger for the thing that it is pointing at. The FW is ‘the over-valent pointing finger,’ in other words – it’s a formalisation that has entirely devoured what is being formalised, a standardisation that swallows what is being standardised, and so what we’re looking at here the malign process of nullification (where the over-valent signifier replaces the reality that is supposedly being signified, where the messenger becomes more important than the messge).
Nullification is where we – in our unholy desire to exhaustively define or categorize the whole world – lose that world entirely. We lose all contact with reality and yet – completely undeterred by this rather significant ‘break’ – we carry on just the same. we carry on as if nothing had changed. It is where we get too clever, too controlling, and end up – as a direct result – disappearing without a trace up our own intestinal tract (and at the same time remaining blissfully unaware of the utter ignominy of this fate). What’s essentially going on in this process is that we’re making ourselves into the Centre of Everything (or rather making our idea of ourselves into the Centre of Everything) and since this notion we have of ourselves is a cheap and trashy ‘invented thing’, bereft of any genuine content whatsoever, everything else becomes ‘cheap and trashy’ too. Everything sinks to the level of the ‘lowest common denominator’, as people used to say. The Mind-Created Identity always lives in a crappy kind of a world, therefore – if the centre (which is to say, the ‘self’) is a cheap fiction then so too is whatever it is that happens to be in orbit around it. If the ego is a laughable fake or charade, then so too must this be the case for the ‘projected domain’ within which that ego has legal residence. The world that exists in relation to the imaginary benchmark (or the imaginary reference point) must itself be ‘imaginary’. The Projected Domain is a nullity because everything about it is an extension of this arbitrary centre (i.e., because it only can have the existence that it does have (or rather, that it seems to have) in relation to this ‘hypothetical-or-assumed’ centre. This is a straightforward case of bootstrapping therefore – this projected-or-conditioned domain only gets to (apparently) exist when we ‘assume a centre’ (which holds everything together) whilst that vital centre (the hook we hang everything on) – in turn – only gets to be a centre in relation to the Formal (or Designed) World that is the extension (or logical development) of that same centre. It couldn’t be a centre ‘all by itself’ (without reference to anything else) because there wouldn’t be anything for it to be central to.
Knowledge of the Fictional World which we create in relation to the ‘centre’ that we have so blithely assumed (which is ‘the self’, or ‘the viewpoint associated with this self’) is a hollow kind of a thing precisely because it exists only in relationship to ourselves, precisely because it exists only in relation to what we have taken as being unquestionably true – namely, our Identity-Based Point of View (which we use as a hook to hang everything on). The identity is – we might say – a ‘cheap and nasty’ type of thing because its only value lies in what it appears to be, or in what it pretends to be, not in what it actually is (which is nothing at all, which is ‘zero content’, which is ‘the ultimate let-down’). The whole package is what we have been calling the Nullity, and the Nullity is the cheapest, nastiest and shoddiest thing going; the Nullity is the cheapest, shoddiest, phoniest thing going and yet – because we know nothing else – we worship it daily. We scorn anything else because anything else (anything outside of our absurdly petty-minded scheme of things) does not confirm what we have said to be unquestionably true, because anything else does not bear witness to our supposed ‘centrality’. It will not praise us (no matter how much we try to make it do so) and so we deride it. We demonize it. Because you are plainly not ‘part of the solution’ – with regard to the all-important (but also absurd) task of making the self-concept seems real when it absolutely isn’t – then you must in this case be ‘part of the problem’. In short, what we might call ‘positive’ or ‘objective’ knowledge is ultimately a hoax since it only holds good for a world that isn’t really there (which is a world that peer pressure won’t let us doubt).
The Formal (or Fictional) World is our own ‘conceit’, (to use the word in this somewhat old-fashioned sense) and we will not tolerate anything or anyone that will not play along with our absurd-but-nevertheless-compulsory scheme of things, anything or anyone who won’t support (or lend credence) to it. We are jealous of ‘the independent agent’; we are vindictive and bad-minded towards anyone who doesn’t acknowledge our (assumed) centrality. We are intolerant of anything that does not bow down to our bloated identity, anything that doesn’t cravenly flatter us. Only flatterers are to be allowed in our camp – anyone else will be persecuted to the full extent of our power. Anyone else will be eliminated; anyone else will be conveniently ‘disappeared’. ‘Either you’re part of the solution or you’re part of the problem’ we like to say, in our unashamedly polarising way, and – as we’ve just said – the problem simply comes down to anyone who won’t bend the knee to the jumped-up Tyrant. The problem is any element that will not serve the assumed centre, any element that fails to conform to the pre-established pattern. The problem is anyone who is wrong-headed enough to point out that the Great Emperor is – in fact – stark-bollock naked (or – as we could also say – the problem is anyone who dares to speak the truth).
The Formal World – as we have said – is the world that is made up of our own descriptions, and our own descriptions inevitably serve our own purposes – how could they not? Our theories of the world serve our biases (they serve the biases which lie behind the theory in question), the bias which lies concealed behind our apparently neutral / objective descriptions. Without a central bias or prejudice that needs to be satisfied we wouldn’t need a theory, we wouldn’t need a model, we wouldn’t need an idea or description of what’s going on. The theory or definition is the logical extension of our cognitive bias, in other words, and because this bias or prejudice is so profoundly invisible to us, so utterly inaccessible to us (since we’re using it as our standpoint or viewpoint), the result is that the theory or formal description (which is our ‘projected reality’) becomes crushingly concrete – it becomes ‘the de facto world’, ‘the de facto reality’. It becomes the de facto world or reality to us simply because nothing else is allowed to be there, simply because nothing else is given any credence, any value whatsoever. The Formal World is a concretized or reified prejudice, therefore – it’s as simple (and as profoundly uninspiring) as that. The FW is Philip K Dick’s Black Iron Prison…
If we look at this situation in terms of information, we can express the point by saying that all theories or definitions of the world are guaranteed to be 100% redundant (which simply means that the output is inherent in the input, that the conclusion is already contained within the premise). Theories are always an extension of the same underlying bias (or choice) on our part, as we have just said; the theory IS the bias – there is no difference between the two. The description has no independent existence or validity of its own; it doesn’t stand on its own two feet but – rather – it is only meaningful in relation to the viewpoint that we ourselves have arbitrarily chosen to go along with (without being aware even for a moment that we have chosen anything). We implicitly deny that there was any choice involved; we resolutely deny that they could have could ever have been some other, ‘radically different’ angles that we could have taken on the matter (if we hadn’t been hopelessly predisposed to see things in the way that we are seeing them) and the result of this denial is informational redundancy (which – in more regular parlance – means meaninglessness). The technical-sounding term ‘redundancy’ can thus be simply translated as bullshit. Thus, the famous Second Law of Thermodynamics – translated into psychological terms – states that the bullshit associated with a Closed World will always increase.
We implicitly assume that there had been ‘no freedom in the beginning’ (which is to say, we assume that we had to see things the particular way that we do see them) and so because of this unwarranted assumption that we’ve made – without acknowledging that we’ve made it – we produce a concrete world, we produce a ‘world that cannot be questioned’. This is what the phrase ‘literally true’ means – we say that our thought-produced picture of the world is literally true (or rather we imply this since it’s taken by everyone concerned as being self-evidence) and what this means is that ‘we aren’t allowed to question it’. It’s a convention, in other words. There is however no such thing as ‘a description or definition of the world that can’t be questioned’ – that’s a ridiculous joke! That’s utterly ludicrous. The game rules can’t be interrogated (they can’t be brought into question if we want to carry on playing the game, which we do) but the game isn’t real, the game is only a game, the game is ‘something we make up and then deny making up’. Not to spend too much time belabouring the point, a ‘game’, in psychological terms, is a lie which we are compelled to believe in (and this compulsion is the only reason we do believe in it). There can’t be any such a thing as ‘a game which contains within it the freedom not to have to play it’; as Carse tells us, if we are to play at all then we must necessarily veil this freedom from ourselves. Freedom (or ‘Openness’) and Finite Games don’t go together.
We started off this discussion by stating that there is no free will in the Formal World (the FW being the world we make up for ourselves with our thoughts, with our unwarranted conclusions and erroneous inferences) – actually, there’s no anything in it! It’s completely ‘content free’ – there is the appearance of ‘stuff happening’ but there’s nothing beneath this appearance. There is the appearance of free will, just as there is the appearance of ‘the one who supposedly has the free will’ and ‘the appearance of whatever it is that this free will supposedly applies to’ (which is to say, the choices or decisions that are made by ‘the chooser’) but seeing as how there never was either ‘a chooser’ nor ‘a choice’ – both of these being aspects of the simulation, both of these being manifestations of the show that is being put on – how can we talk in terms of there being such a thing as ‘free will’? Free will (like everything else we think we understand) is ‘a construct of this simulation’. It’s what ‘hooks us into the game’, and so the moment we see that there is no such thing as free will the game is also the moment when we see that there is no one there exercising it. The ‘one who supposedly chooses’ is a predetermined function of the game, just as the so-called ‘choices’ are…
Image credit – isupportstreetart.com
