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Reminds me of Comed-Tea in "Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality": "If you drink it, something surprising is bound to happen which makes you spill it on yourself or someone else. But it's charmed to vanish just a few seconds later"
In what way will an entity that has free will behave differently than both a fully deterministic entity and an entity that is deterministic excepting occasional random events?
I have yet to see either an answer to that question, or a definition of free will that leads to one. Until then, I consider all speculation and meditation on the "revelation" that we have none to be a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Reminds me of Comed-Tea in "Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality": "If you drink it, something surprising is bound to happen which makes you spill it on yourself or someone else. But it's charmed to vanish just a few seconds later"
Except of course, that was done via a cheap trick with minor prescience: the tea transmits an urge to drink into your mind when it detects that something funny is about to happen.
Still, I don't see why the Predictor couldn't work in the same way - how would you determine that it doesn't?
When you think about it, it is what I would expect. Your awareness is the product of nerves firing, so they have to fire before it can be reflected in your consciousness. If you decide to recall some information, the neurons storing that information have to be activated (they have to fire). If you can create a device (and we have) to detect those nerves as they are firing you will know what person is trying to recall before (by some miniscule lead time) they are aware of it.
Oh my... another meditation on the issue of free will, and the existential angst we would experience if we learned that our choices are deterministic. Personally, however, I think that the whole question of free-will vs. determinism is a false dilemma. For me, another issue is more important: Determinism vs. randomness. If my choices are not deterministic, they must be random. I would rather be deterministic than ran…
If my choices are not deterministic, they must be random. But this is not what is classically understood by free-will, and I suggest that it is your dilemma which is false. Quoting Aquinas, "Free-will is the cause of its own movement, because by his free-will man moves himself to act." I anticipate that free-will thus understood is likely ruled out a priori by your philosophical disposition. Nonetheless, I think you…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As I see it, if you consider the universe to be a series of states[1], either the next state is perfectly determined by the previous one, or there is a (finite) set of possibilities for the next state. The latter therefore exhibits randomness. I'm happy to be challenged on my philosophical disposition though, because I'm aware that there are whole schools of thought that seem like vague informal nonsense to me, and I…
Indeed, what I am saying is that you can have the deterministic universe, or the random universe, and still have free-will, properly understood. Note that from the outside, free-will is by definition apparently "random". It is a black box not determined by any variables in the greater world. What matters is that the free-will is mine or yours -- that the entity known as to me as myself or to you as yourself should al…
I am entirely happy to accept that free will is compatible with determinism, and it sounds like we have similar views on this issue. Personally I consider ownership of "will" to be a far more important notion than that of some abstract metaphysical "freedom".
Anyone that liked this should definitely check this one as well by the same author: http://infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm
I highly recommend Ted Chiang. I really enjoyed "Story of your Life" available in this short story collection of the same name: http://www.amazon.com/Stories-Your-Life-Others-Chiang/dp/193... Some of the stuff is a but uneven but he's written some of the most thought-provoking sci-fi I've read in some time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If my choices are not deterministic, they must be random. But this is not what is classically understood by free-will, and I suggest that it is your dilemma which is false. Quoting Aquinas, "Free-will is the cause of its own movement, because by his free-will man moves himself to act." I anticipate that free-will thus understood is likely ruled out a priori by your philosophical disposition. Nonetheless, I think you…
As I see it, if you consider the universe to be a series of states[1], either the next state is perfectly determined by the previous one, or there is a (finite) set of possibilities for the next state. The latter therefore exhibits randomness. I'm happy to be challenged on my philosophical disposition though, because I'm aware that there are whole schools of thought that seem like vague informal nonsense to me, and I…
The other major interpretation would be that out of the possible futures one is randomly selected based on its probability. Determinism without branching doesn't seem like an option given the laws of physics, correct me if I'm wrong anyone?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As I see it, if you consider the universe to be a series of states[1], either the next state is perfectly determined by the previous one, or there is a (finite) set of possibilities for the next state. The latter therefore exhibits randomness. I'm happy to be challenged on my philosophical disposition though, because I'm aware that there are whole schools of thought that seem like vague informal nonsense to me, and I…
On [1], one interpretation of quantum mechanics says that the universe is the evolution of all possible future worlds through branching: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation The other major interpretation would be that out of the possible futures one is randomly selected based on its probability. Determinism without branching doesn't seem like an option given the laws of physics, correct me if I'm…
This comment goes into more detail about what we do know: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7069261
Also, if we were being obtuse, we can describe any (finite) probabilistic universe as a deterministic one with enough rules.