On 13.07.2012 20:43 meekerdb said the following:
On 7/13/2012 11:14 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
...
My question would be not about responsibility, I am not that far.
Let us take a chess game (the example from John). We have two
people playing chess and then for example the M-theory.
How would you characterize the relationship between the M-theory
and players.
I would characterize them as being at separate levels of
description.
In what sense it is possible to say that the players play their own
game?
In the sense that there are no significant outside sources
influencing the players (like a grandmaster whispering in their
ear).
How unpredictability would help here?
I don't understand "help". Are you striving to reach some conclusion
you have not revealed?
You have mentioned the chaos theory when you have written about
predictability. Frankly speaking I do not understand the point, the
chaos theory claims. If I understand correctly, it basically says
that the uncertainty in the initial condition brings
unpredictability. Yet, I do not understand where the uncertainty in
initial conditions come from. If we discuss things in principle,
then we should consider the case when the initial conditions are
known exactly.
But that's the point. In chaos theory things are only predictable if
initial conditions (and the evolutionary calculations) are carried
to infinite precision - which is impossible. You want to consider a
case where we start with infinite information to predict an outcome
which is defined only by finite information?
If you mean predicting future by human beings, then this is not the
question I am interested in. To this end, one can also employ Wolfram's
computational irreducibility.
"Because I’ve seen so many cases where simple rules end up generating
immensely rich and complex behavior."
"And that’s made me think it’s not nearly so implausible that our whole
universe could come from a simple rule."
"But really it’s all completely deterministic."
"That somehow knowing the laws of the universe would tell us how humans
would act–and give us a way to compute and predict human behavior."
"Of course, to many people this always seemed implausible–because we
feel that we have some form of free will."
"And now, with computational irreducibility, we can see how this can
still be consistent with deterministic underlying laws."
It seems that your viewpoint is similar. If not, please tell where there
is the difference.
My question was rather philosophical. It is unrelated to practical
things, well, the M-theory is anyway unrelated to human practice. In my
view, for engineering it does not matter whether the underlying
principles is based on natural numbers of on the M-theory.
Still, let us look again at the game of chess. If we look at it in
principle, then it is actually the Game of Life mentioned in the last
chapter of Grand Design. The conglomerates of atoms move other
conglomerates of atoms according to completely deterministic laws. Could
you please demonstrate how to introduce separate level of descriptions
in this process to bring some sense in playing chess? (but please not at
the practical level, let us still stay at the level in principle).
Evgenii
--
http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2010/07/stephen-wolframs-computational-irreducibility.html
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