Thanks for your response.
A brief observation on emergentism. It seems to me to be a kind of get-out-of-jail idea. We have absolutely no idea how this could have happened by natural, random (i.e. Darwinian) processes, therefore we have to assume that at a certain level of complexity, something just emerges (as if by magic). This is a position its advocates are forced to adopt because the processes which lead to this ‘emergence’ are invisible, since they operate outside of spacetime. (I’ve been writing a lot about quantum physics recently.)
Regarding free will, we shouldn’t adopt an absolute position. For me, it’s all about the evolution of consciousness. The more we become aware of our instincts and what drives us, the more we analyse our own thoughts and psyche, the more we can disidentify from the subpersonalities and complexes which influence us, the more free we can become.
Evolution, and what drives it, is also a complex topic. You might be interested in a series of articles I’ve just started on Carl Jung, archetypes and the collective unconscious. It’s hard to say for certain whether it is directed or not, because most of the contributing factors are invisible. I wouldn’t rule out the idea of direction in some sense.
Nice analogy with jazz. You ask, where’s the sheet music? Not even a chord chart? These were the views of physicist David Bohm on that theme (taken from a recent article of mine):
He compares the movements of electrons in the laboratory to those of ballet dancers responding to a musical score, the score itself constituting a common ‘pool’ of information that guides each of the dancers as he takes his steps. Each electron is sensitive not just to the information, or meaning, latent in its own wave packet (its own part in the score). It is also non-locally responsive to the information latent in the whole situation… For Bohm, this sharing of information, this mutual ‘knowing’, may represent elementary conscious awareness on the part of the electron. I’m sure that jazz players don’t know that they are behaving like electrons.
I hope that wasn’t too verbose.
