11–20 of 189 posts
I normally enjoy PG's writings! His writings on Lisp had good influence on me. But these recent posts are embarrassing.
How can someone who has had so much influence in tech communities bring themselves to write these pseudo-scientific posts so glibly?
IMO free will is only the guarantee by God that he won't be messing with our program while it's running. Ie. He won't use His debugger to change our state, or make us do things that are not in our programming. Free will is us programs running NOT under God's debugger. This is not to say that we don't have a say in our ultimate wants, assuming we can't change them. Perhaps we (our soul) still decided on them originall…
IMO free will is only the guarantee by God that he won't be messing with our program while it's running. Ie. He won't use His debugger to change our state, or make us do things that are not in our programming. Free will is us programs running NOT under God's debugger. This is not to say that we don't have a say in our ultimate wants, assuming we can't change them. Perhaps we (our soul) still decided on them originall…
I don't quite understand - you're using our "programming" as an argument that we have free will? Wouldn't our "programming" imply that our will is already deterministic?
In other words, is there any difference between our will being driven by our programming, and driven by God's debugger? We're following orders either way...
The reality is much weirder and complex.
Both start by thinking, and choosing to think about X is certainly in our control¹. So at the bottom of it, both are just chemical reactions in your brain, willingly set off by your ghost.
¹that is not to say that not thinking about Y is also in our control.
Ultrafinite recursion strikes again!
I probably don't have much to contribute, but I wanted to share some thoughts on the concept of free will Paul seems to brush against. I found the concept of free will at odds with my opinion that the brain and physics are very deterministic. But one thing the "free will doesn't exist" people tend to forget, is that the brain rewires and changes itself. You are destined to do what your brain is wired to do, but doing…
I probably don't have much to contribute, but I wanted to share some thoughts on the concept of free will Paul seems to brush against. I found the concept of free will at odds with my opinion that the brain and physics are very deterministic. But one thing the "free will doesn't exist" people tend to forget, is that the brain rewires and changes itself. You are destined to do what your brain is wired to do, but doing…
Not to get too much into the 'quantum woo' territory, but my naive understanding is that the physics is only somewhat deterministic, b/c non-deterministic quantum events can have macroscopic effects?
Say you decide for whether you'll eat a dinner, if a particle with half-time of 1 second will split within the next second.
This you wouldn't be able to predict, even if you knew momenta of all particles within your local light-cone (of 1 light-second), no?
(a variation of the Schroedinger's cat)