On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 12:54 PM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On 8/17/2012 12:51 AM, Jason Resch wrote: > > > I don't follow this. Can you explain how? > > If super intelligent aliens secretly came to earth and predicted your > actions, how has that diminished the freedom you had before their arrival? > > > >> >> Someone asked why this concept is important. It isn't for me, per se, >> but I would imagine that someone implementing an agent that must >> survive in a messy real world environment (eg an autonomous robot) >> will need to consider this issue, and build something like it into >> their robot. >> >> > I agree with Bruno. A mind can only be made less free if it is built > from non-deterministic parts, it is less free to be itself in its full > sense because with parts that do not behave in predictable ways, there is > no way to perfectly realize a given personality. They will always have > some level of capriciousness that will stand in the way of that person > realizing the person they are meant/designed to be. The mind will never > work perfectly as intended, at best it can only asymptotically approach > some ideal. > > > That's an interesting take, but why isn't caprice part of a personality? > Caprice, as an element of personality can be simulated using chaotic, but deterministic, processes. But if the operation of, rather than external inputs to, a mind random, the mind will not be able to express itself 100% of the time. X% of the time you may be interacting with the flawlessly operating mind, and the (1 - X%) of the time, the mind fails to operate correctly due to a random failure of the mind's underlying platform. It is a bit like the difference between a computer with working memory, and one with a fault memory that occasionally causes bits to flip. A properly operating program can still exhibit unpredictable behavior because its internal operation can be hidden from inspection, but you never know what you might do if you have non-deterministic hardware. A computer with an internal hardware-based random number generator can still exercise its will 100% of the time, because the logical decisions made by the computer's processor remain 100% deterministic, and thus its program code retains its meaning. > What's the standard of "perfectly as intended" if the intention were to be > upredictable? > A deterministic mind faced with the goal would have to use pseudo randomness. It is not difficult to remain unpredictable. For every n bits of of memory, a pseudo-random algorithm can produce on the order of 2^n bits of output before repeating. > And given that one's knowledge is never complete, game theory shows that > being able to make a random choice is optimum in many situations. > One's will can remain free, and choose to defer to a random source. E.g., I choose to flip a coin to determine which shirt to wear. But if one loses the choice to decide what to do, due to randomness, then they have lost some freedom for their will: it wasn't their choice, it was that of the random process. E.g., I chose to wear the blue shirt not because my mind decided to, but because a cosmic ray hit my neuron and cause a cascade of other firings leading to the selection of the blue shirt. You can see this clearly if you imagine a sliding scale, on one side, decision making is made on 100% deterministic processes, on the other, 100% random. One obviously has no freedom if all decisions are made by something else (the random process), so my question is, at what point on this scale is maximum freedom achieved? > > > > I do agree with Russell that there are evolutionary advantages for > access to a source of good randomness. It would enable people to choose > better passwords, be better poker players, pick lottery numbers with fewer > collisions, and so on. But I am not convinced humans access to anything > approaching a good random number generator. > > > But "good" is relative. Humans aren't very good at arithmetic either, but > they can do it and it's useful. > > It is certainly worse than random oracles, cryptographically secure rngs, statistically sound but insecure rngs, and it seems much worse than even the very faulty C's rand() function. Therefore, I don't buy the argument that true randomness is an integral part of the mind, at least it isn't at a level we can use when we try to be random. Jason > > If we did, I would see it more as a sense which is external to the mind. > The mind could determinsitically decide to make use of inputs from this > sense, but even if the mind never drew on this random oracle it would still > be every bit as free to exercise its will. > > > I agree with that. > > Brent > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. 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