@FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca @showerthoughts@lemmy.world

There's this scene, next to the end of "The Artifice Girl", where Cherry (a young-girl AI designed to hunt and bust CSA criminals in partnership between her creator/programmer, a detective and a cop; mission gets successful, virtually ending online CSA, then she receives a physical robotic vessel so CSA can be hunted down in the physical realm too) is talking to her creator. Once the mission is totally successful and CSA crimes got essentially zeroed, the creator gives her a key to autonomical behavior (but he's far from benevolent: he always saw her coldly through engineer eyes, as he was the one who coded her existence; he only handles her the "key to autonomy" because he's dying, and only after insistence both from her and from one of the human detectives). On the one hand, she dreams of getting into ballet, but she complains how she is "influenced by the initial directives" inherent to her creation: no matter what she decides, it'd be always consequence of said directives.

Maybe my recounting is a bit off because I watched the movie a long time ago, but essentially it's a "Demiurge and his creation" moment: creation is tied to immutable principles (creation directives) that influence the creation. No matter how we look at reality, be it religiously/spiritually or scientifically, there's this common ground of causality: things, and by extension living beings, are inexorably tied to the invisible chains of cause and effect, and this includes the very mechanisms (both spiritual and physical) from which sentience emerges.

Then I came to the conclusion that, if there's any bearer of True Will (as per the term coined by A. Crowley), is just one: exclusively the causality, specifically what's known by science as thermodynamic Entropy and, by everything else, as... Death, yeah, the one with a scythe.

"Decision" is part of inteligence, and intelligence is not Will, let alone True Will. And there can't be True Will within causality, only the cosmic bearer of causality possesses True Will, because She's way beyond the causality: Death Herself isn't bounded by causality, everything else is.

And no, we're not "lying" to "ourselves" when we think we are thinking, it's just part of the script, where we're so bounded to the chains of causality that the mechanisms of intelligence always seek explanations based on causality: see, for example, those experiments where the corpus callosum is severed and the patients try to justify when asked why their hands wrote diverging things (their brain hemispheres aren't talking, but each hemisphere can't even "conceive" this kind of situation so they can't help but "hallucinate" an explanation).