Re: Free will in MWI
On Jun 3, 4:38 pm, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: On Jun 3, 4:48 pm, RMahoney rmaho...@poteau.com wrote: On Jun 1, 7:08 pm, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: On Jun 1, 7:07 pm, RMahoney rmaho...@poteau.com wrote: On Jun 1, 1:31 pm, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: On May 31, 6:14 pm, RMahoney rmaho...@poteau.com wrote: They seem to think this free will has some ability to manipulate the Universe in ways that avoid it's laws. Free will is one of the laws of the universe. We are made of the universe, therefore whatever we do or can do is inherently a potential of the universe. Free will is not a basic law or building block of the universe. The sense of free will is a result of the process of the universe. I used to think that too, but why should a 'sense of free' will be the result of any process in any universe? What would it accomplish? What process would produce it? Anything that is in the present universe is here because it is either stable enough to last a long time or capable enough to survive a long time, basically the process of evolution. A sense of free will or consciousness developed as minds became intelligent enough to make decisions that would increase their chances of survival. Why would it develop though? It's like saying that vanilla palm trees developed as minds became intelligent enough to make decisions that would increase their chances of survival. My immune system makes decisions all the time which increase my chance of survival. Even if it could benefit by having some sort of experience of 'free will' in making those decisions (which it wouldn't), how could such an 'experience' appear in a purely mechanistic context. It's a just-so story. You assume the primacy of evolution and work backwards from there. Did electromagnetic charge evolve? Did velocity evolve? Mass? Not everything is explained by evolution - only the differentiation of biological species. I don't know what you are proposing - that the sense of will always existed and created the universe? Where did the sense of will come from if not through a process of evolution? Are you a creationist? Yes a non-biological evolution could explain electromagnetism, mass, velocity, energy, etc. I don't believe I willed myself into existence. I cannot will myself to avoid the end of my existence. While I'm here I cannot break any of the laws of the Universe. You don't break the laws, you make new laws. The law of the universe was once 'human beings cannot fly'. Laws of the universe I'm referring to are the real laws, not human's attempt at defining them. Human beings cannot fly is a human thought, not a law. All laws that we understand are necessarily defined by humans. They are our interpretations of observations using our senses, our body, and instruments which we have designed with our senses to extend our human body and human mind. If there is any truly real law, it is that our understanding of what they are gets rewritten frequently. There is an underlying order to the universe that we have not defined yet, and may never be able to define. It does not mean that underlying order does not exist, or that the only order or law that exists is what we define. The whole idea that there is an order to the universe that is separate from the actual universe is metaphysics. If such a thing existed, why go through the formality of creating a universe? Why not just have the laws existing in perfection in their never-never land? There is no order without sense. I never said there was anything separate from the universe. The universe is everything. Everything possible. There never was nothing, there was/is always everything. We are all molecular machines. Then molecular machines are also us and molecules are telepathic. Systems of molecules and energy can transmit information across distances, so? Not information. Feelings. Thoughts. Images. Comedy. Irony. Human life. A bar graph is information. Getting your molars ripped out with a pair of pliers is more different. Sorry but feelings, thoughts, images, comedy, irony, are all the result of information processing. These things do not exist without the programming of our molecular computer. Why would information processing produce anything at all other than more information processing? There is no reason for feeling to arise out of information. If a system has data then it can execute a function without needing to conjure up some kind of 'feeling' or experience. Informaiton, on the other hand, is obviously a reduction of complex qualities into simplistic abstractions. I count five apples and then I can manipulate the quantitative concept of five rather than deal with the full reality of the apples. Feeling and sense are
Re: Free will in MWI
On Jun 1, 7:08 pm, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: On Jun 1, 7:07 pm, RMahoney rmaho...@poteau.com wrote: On Jun 1, 1:31 pm, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: On May 31, 6:14 pm, RMahoney rmaho...@poteau.com wrote: They seem to think this free will has some ability to manipulate the Universe in ways that avoid it's laws. Free will is one of the laws of the universe. We are made of the universe, therefore whatever we do or can do is inherently a potential of the universe. Free will is not a basic law or building block of the universe. The sense of free will is a result of the process of the universe. I used to think that too, but why should a 'sense of free' will be the result of any process in any universe? What would it accomplish? What process would produce it? Anything that is in the present universe is here because it is either stable enough to last a long time or capable enough to survive a long time, basically the process of evolution. A sense of free will or consciousness developed as minds became intelligent enough to make decisions that would increase their chances of survival. I don't believe I willed myself into existence. I cannot will myself to avoid the end of my existence. While I'm here I cannot break any of the laws of the Universe. You don't break the laws, you make new laws. The law of the universe was once 'human beings cannot fly'. Laws of the universe I'm referring to are the real laws, not human's attempt at defining them. Human beings cannot fly is a human thought, not a law. All laws that we understand are necessarily defined by humans. They are our interpretations of observations using our senses, our body, and instruments which we have designed with our senses to extend our human body and human mind. If there is any truly real law, it is that our understanding of what they are gets rewritten frequently. There is an underlying order to the universe that we have not defined yet, and may never be able to define. It does not mean that underlying order does not exist, or that the only order or law that exists is what we define. We are all molecular machines. Then molecular machines are also us and molecules are telepathic. Systems of molecules and energy can transmit information across distances, so? Not information. Feelings. Thoughts. Images. Comedy. Irony. Human life. A bar graph is information. Getting your molars ripped out with a pair of pliers is more different. Sorry but feelings, thoughts, images, comedy, irony, are all the result of information processing. These things do not exist without the programming of our molecular computer. Those molecules operate within the laws of the Universe. We wouldn't know. We only experience molecules indirectly through our instrument-extended perception. What we see of molecules is even less than what an alien astronomer would see looking at the grey patches of human mold growing on the land surfaces of the Earth. The result of their action allows me to think and reason and decide on a course of action, execute a will so to speak, but that will is determined by the sequence of events of the molecules that make up my self. If I move my arm, I directly move it. I don't even need to cognitively 'decide' to move it, I just move the whole arm all at once from my point of view on my native scale of perception. That there are molecules, cells and tissues which make up my brain and body is a fact of a different layer, a different perceptual inertial frame where I don't exist at all. The fact remains though, that I can move my arm at will, and whatever molecular processes need to happen to fulfill my intention will be compelled to happen. That's why there is a difference between voluntary muscles and involuntary muscles. Some I control, some I don't, some control me. There is the molecular process that occurs when you command movement, but there is also the molecular and electrical process that occurs to develop that command. It doesn't happen out of thin air. It happens out of my active participation in the semantic context of myself and my world. It happens out of desire, purpose, whim, intuition. I command my brain directly. It is top-down as well as bottom up. You are assuming bottom up only which would posit the tortured reasoning of neurons moving my arm for some evolutionary or biochemical reason...which is not true. If it were true, it would be easy to tell because we would have no division of voluntary and involuntary muscle tissue in our body. It would all be automatic. Why should evolution not create both voluntary and involuntary muscle tissue? Animals are mobile for a reason, need to command voluntary tissue to find food or flee from predators. Need to make decisions. Develop the will to do so. All in response to outside
Re: Free will in MWI
On Jun 3, 4:48 pm, RMahoney rmaho...@poteau.com wrote: On Jun 1, 7:08 pm, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: On Jun 1, 7:07 pm, RMahoney rmaho...@poteau.com wrote: On Jun 1, 1:31 pm, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: On May 31, 6:14 pm, RMahoney rmaho...@poteau.com wrote: They seem to think this free will has some ability to manipulate the Universe in ways that avoid it's laws. Free will is one of the laws of the universe. We are made of the universe, therefore whatever we do or can do is inherently a potential of the universe. Free will is not a basic law or building block of the universe. The sense of free will is a result of the process of the universe. I used to think that too, but why should a 'sense of free' will be the result of any process in any universe? What would it accomplish? What process would produce it? Anything that is in the present universe is here because it is either stable enough to last a long time or capable enough to survive a long time, basically the process of evolution. A sense of free will or consciousness developed as minds became intelligent enough to make decisions that would increase their chances of survival. Why would it develop though? It's like saying that vanilla palm trees developed as minds became intelligent enough to make decisions that would increase their chances of survival. My immune system makes decisions all the time which increase my chance of survival. Even if it could benefit by having some sort of experience of 'free will' in making those decisions (which it wouldn't), how could such an 'experience' appear in a purely mechanistic context. It's a just-so story. You assume the primacy of evolution and work backwards from there. Did electromagnetic charge evolve? Did velocity evolve? Mass? Not everything is explained by evolution - only the differentiation of biological species. I don't believe I willed myself into existence. I cannot will myself to avoid the end of my existence. While I'm here I cannot break any of the laws of the Universe. You don't break the laws, you make new laws. The law of the universe was once 'human beings cannot fly'. Laws of the universe I'm referring to are the real laws, not human's attempt at defining them. Human beings cannot fly is a human thought, not a law. All laws that we understand are necessarily defined by humans. They are our interpretations of observations using our senses, our body, and instruments which we have designed with our senses to extend our human body and human mind. If there is any truly real law, it is that our understanding of what they are gets rewritten frequently. There is an underlying order to the universe that we have not defined yet, and may never be able to define. It does not mean that underlying order does not exist, or that the only order or law that exists is what we define. The whole idea that there is an order to the universe that is separate from the actual universe is metaphysics. If such a thing existed, why go through the formality of creating a universe? Why not just have the laws existing in perfection in their never-never land? There is no order without sense. We are all molecular machines. Then molecular machines are also us and molecules are telepathic. Systems of molecules and energy can transmit information across distances, so? Not information. Feelings. Thoughts. Images. Comedy. Irony. Human life. A bar graph is information. Getting your molars ripped out with a pair of pliers is more different. Sorry but feelings, thoughts, images, comedy, irony, are all the result of information processing. These things do not exist without the programming of our molecular computer. Why would information processing produce anything at all other than more information processing? There is no reason for feeling to arise out of information. If a system has data then it can execute a function without needing to conjure up some kind of 'feeling' or experience. Informaiton, on the other hand, is obviously a reduction of complex qualities into simplistic abstractions. I count five apples and then I can manipulate the quantitative concept of five rather than deal with the full reality of the apples. Feeling and sense are concretely real, information is an a posteriori analysis - detached, lifeless, inauthentic - just like CGI and AI. Forever sterile and empty in spite of increasing sophistication and complexity. Those molecules operate within the laws of the Universe. We wouldn't know. We only experience molecules indirectly through our instrument-extended perception. What we see of molecules is even less than what an alien astronomer would see looking at the grey patches of human mold growing on the land surfaces of the Earth. The result of their action allows me to think and reason and
Re: Free will in MWI
On 6/3/2012 1:48 PM, RMahoney wrote: I used to think that too, but why should a 'sense of free' will be the result of any process in any universe? What would it accomplish? What process would produce it? Anything that is in the present universe is here because it is either stable enough to last a long time or capable enough to survive a long time, basically the process of evolution. A sense of free will or consciousness developed as minds became intelligent enough to make decisions that would increase their chances of survival. I think that is looking at the problem the wrong way around. The feeling of free will is just the realization that, even after the fact, I don't know all the things that determined my action so I have the feeling that I could have done differently. The ability to reflect on why you chose to do something and give reasons is useful for learning and for teaching and persuading others. But that doesn't imply that a detailed knowledge, say at the level of neurons, would be useful and certainly not worth the cost in terms of memory. So consciousness only includes a small part of the information processing our brain does. 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On 01 Jun 2012, at 23:42, RMahoney wrote: Does a Free Willer believe they willed themselves into existence in this Universe? Some can believe that. Open question in comp. Actually this universe is a quite vague concept with comp. Don't know comp. comp is the idea that we are (a priori material or natural) machine. It the old mechanism of Descartes, without the dualism. But it leads to the fact that matter and nature exists only in number's dream (that computation in arithmetic seen from the first person point of view). See my papers for the argument, or read my recent conversation with Charles and LizR). As far as I'm concerned, universe can be everything, all permutations. I don't believe there is a mind separate from body. You don't have a mind (or a soul, or whatever metaphysical description of consciousness one might subscribe to) until you have the matter and energy arranged to form the mind. That's locally true for the human mind, but globally false. Matter emerges from the interference of the many computations/dream occuring in arithmetic. I know matter is a mental concept but yeah, whatever makes up the calculation of that stuff we perceive as matter and energy. Computer is a mathematical notion, even arithmetical. Once you accept elementary arithmetic, all computations are there, and it makes arithmetic a realm of everything (even a tiny part of arithmetic actually). Advantage: it explains where the laws of physics come from, and it gives the mean to distinguish quanta and qulaia, and explain the difference of their nature. When that comes together, you have a mind, and at some point that mind develops a will, but not the other way around. OK. They seem to think this free will has some ability to manipulate the Universe in ways that avoid it's laws. Not the compatibilist one. I think free will is not prevented at all by determinism. I agree, will (free has no meaning to me) is enabled by determinism. If there were no process of cause/effect then there could be no calculation of will. I don't believe I willed myself into existence. I cannot will myself to avoid the end of my existence. If that exists. Again my existence is quite a vague notion. Basically I'm saying existence is needed before a will can exist, not the other way around. Yes. But with comp we need only the existence in the same sense as prime numbers exist. We don't need and actually cannot use the hypothesis of existence of primary matter (Aristotle). You have to build the computer before you can execute a program, not the other way around. Computer are just relative universal number (I am explaining this currently in other thread). While I'm here I cannot break any of the laws of the Universe. We are all molecular machines. Locally, that is very plausible, but near death, this is no more assured unless you introduce actual infinities in bith matter and mind, and some link between. We are not bodies, we own bodies. Molecules are clothes, and actually they are map of our most probable computations in arithmetic. This is a consequence of the idea that we are machines. It makes materialism wrong eventually. Matter is a mind construction. We are the program which does not exist without the machine (computer). OK. Those molecules operate within the laws of the Universe. If that exists. Locally, it is true, but not globally. Locally and currently, yes, I understand. The result of their action allows me to think and reason and decide on a course of action, execute a will so to speak, but that will is determined by the sequence of events of the molecules that make up my self. To say free will implies that I somehow avoided the laws of the Universe and resulting cause and effect. Free from the laws of the Universe. In that sense, there is no such thing as free will, only will, that is determined by your physical being and sequence of molecular action. OK. Locally. Now I myself believe that probably the laws of the Universe allow it to be non-deterministic. My logic might be simple on this, but if there were no randomness at all, there could be no evolution of the Universe (and probably the laws of the Universe) to become the Universe we observe today. I think if we started (over and over again) with the same initial condition of this moment, that the next moment could be any number of potential outcomes, all within the same laws of the same Universe. The Universe is built upon the laws of probability, and at the short term macro level things can be fairly predictable, but at the micro level and over long periods of time, things are not so predictable, due to random events at the quantum level. I also subscribe to the idea that all possible outcomes exist simultaneously and forever, as do all possible histories. OK. But with different probabilities, and we can manage them from inside. Yes I
Re: Free will in MWI
On 2 June 2012 10:29, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: or read my recent conversation with Charles and LizR) On the FOAR list, that is! David -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On 31 May 2012, at 23:12, meekerdb wrote: On 5/31/2012 1:41 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 31, 3:49 pm, John Clarkjohnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: There were reasons behind Lewis Carroll's writings and so what he wrote was nonsense not gibberish; I do six impossible things before breakfast is nonsense, sdfgsaiywjevry66baq is gibberish, as is free will. Except that sdfgsaiywjevry66baq is not in every dictionary of the English language that exists, but free will is. It's not a term that is looked up very often though probably, since everyone except you knows exactly what it means already. Sam Harris just wrote a short book titled Free Will and from the comments it has elicited it's apparent that there is very little agreement as to what it means. Sam, for example, rejects compatibilist free will (e.g. as defended by Daniel Dennett) because he says 'free will' decisions must be conscious decisions. The idea that free will need consciousness and the idea of compatibilism seems compatible to me. Have you an idea why Sam find those ideas incompatible? Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On 01 Jun 2012, at 00:14, RMahoney wrote: Following the last couple of weeks of exchange between Craig and John Clark... Interesting. I would say John has the edge. And I have some comments... Does a Free Willer believe they willed themselves into existence in this Universe? Some can believe that. Open question in comp. Actually this universe is a quite vague concept with comp. They seem to think this free will has some ability to manipulate the Universe in ways that avoid it's laws. Not the compatibilist one. I think free will is not prevented at all by determinism. I don't believe I willed myself into existence. I cannot will myself to avoid the end of my existence. If that exists. Again my existence is quite a vague notion. While I'm here I cannot break any of the laws of the Universe. We are all molecular machines. Locally, that is very plausible, but near death, this is no more assured unless you introduce actual infinities in bith matter and mind, and some link between. We are not bodies, we own bodies. Molecules are clothes, and actually they are map of our most probable computations in arithmetic. This is a consequence of the idea that we are machines. It makes materialism wrong eventually. Matter is a mind construction. Those molecules operate within the laws of the Universe. If that exists. Locally, it is true, but not globally. The result of their action allows me to think and reason and decide on a course of action, execute a will so to speak, but that will is determined by the sequence of events of the molecules that make up my self. To say free will implies that I somehow avoided the laws of the Universe and resulting cause and effect. Free from the laws of the Universe. In that sense, there is no such thing as free will, only will, that is determined by your physical being and sequence of molecular action. OK. Locally. Now I myself believe that probably the laws of the Universe allow it to be non-deterministic. My logic might be simple on this, but if there were no randomness at all, there could be no evolution of the Universe (and probably the laws of the Universe) to become the Universe we observe today. I think if we started (over and over again) with the same initial condition of this moment, that the next moment could be any number of potential outcomes, all within the same laws of the same Universe. The Universe is built upon the laws of probability, and at the short term macro level things can be fairly predictable, but at the micro level and over long periods of time, things are not so predictable, due to random events at the quantum level. I also subscribe to the idea that all possible outcomes exist simultaneously and forever, as do all possible histories. OK. But with different probabilities, and we can manage them from inside. A good thing to avoid sending to a gibberish message. If it is possible for it to exist, it exists, and always can exist. Else it would be impossible, and not exist. I doubt anything like this could ever be proven, but it makes logical sense to me. This is more or less guarantied by the comp hypothesis indeed. But I do not see that this non-deterministic quality of the Universe in any way creates a free will. I agree. That is the key point. Indeterminacy would not add free will, which needs some amount of determinacy to assure the possibility of planning. Free will is more a form of awareness of self-indeterminacy. We just don't live at the level of the determinate laws. No murderer will justify his crimes by saying that he was just obeying to the physical laws. It is basically a confusion of level of description. It just makes the Universe really infinite in possibilities. Will cannot be executed without cause. OK. Even if the result of that process of executing a will was at some point affected by a random quantum event. OK. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On 6/1/2012 7:56 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 31 May 2012, at 23:12, meekerdb wrote: On 5/31/2012 1:41 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 31, 3:49 pm, John Clarkjohnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: There were reasons behind Lewis Carroll's writings and so what he wrote was nonsense not gibberish; I do six impossible things before breakfast is nonsense, sdfgsaiywjevry66baq is gibberish, as is free will. Except that sdfgsaiywjevry66baq is not in every dictionary of the English language that exists, but free will is. It's not a term that is looked up very often though probably, since everyone except you knows exactly what it means already. Sam Harris just wrote a short book titled Free Will and from the comments it has elicited it's apparent that there is very little agreement as to what it means. Sam, for example, rejects compatibilist free will (e.g. as defended by Daniel Dennett) because he says 'free will' decisions must be conscious decisions. The idea that free will need consciousness and the idea of compatibilism seems compatible to me. Have you an idea why Sam find those ideas incompatible? Because, almost all of our thinking, including making decisions, is unconscious. I think he implicitly relies on the fold idea of free will so, How can I be the author of my decision if I didn't even think about it. He argues that we can't accept the unconscious working of our bodies as instantiating free will decisions because, he says, it would be absurd to accept the actions of bacteria in your body as representing your free will. Of course Sam rejects incompatibilist free will too and says free will is an illusion of an illusion. Anyway, if you're interested you can read it yourself, it's only 66 pages. Brent Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On 01.06.2012 19:19 meekerdb said the following: On 6/1/2012 7:56 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 31 May 2012, at 23:12, meekerdb wrote: ... Sam Harris just wrote a short book titled Free Will and from the comments it has elicited it's apparent that there is very little agreement as to what it means. Sam, for example, rejects compatibilist free will (e.g. as defended by Daniel Dennett) because he says 'free will' decisions must be conscious decisions. The idea that free will need consciousness and the idea of compatibilism seems compatible to me. Have you an idea why Sam find those ideas incompatible? Because, almost all of our thinking, including making decisions, is unconscious. I think he implicitly relies on the fold idea of free will so, How can I be the author of my decision if I didn't even think about it. He argues that we can't accept the unconscious working of our bodies as instantiating free will decisions because, he says, it would be absurd to accept the actions of bacteria in your body as representing your free will. Of course Sam rejects incompatibilist free will too and says free will is an illusion of an illusion. Anyway, if you're interested you can read it yourself, it's only 66 pages. Recently I have seen another book in this direction: Derk Pereboom, Living without Free Will (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy) Evgenii -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On 6/1/2012 8:12 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: They seem to think this free will has some ability to manipulate the Universe in ways that avoid it's laws. Not the compatibilist one. I think free will is not prevented at all by determinism. It just boils down to how you want to define 'free will'. The definition is purposeful and free of coercion is important because it plays a part in social judgement and legal assignment of responsibility. Determinism is thought to be inconsistent with responsibility because some cause outside yourself doesn't count as your responsibility; but given determinism each of your actions can be traced back to causes outside yourself, even to before your birth. 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 31, 6:14 pm, RMahoney rmaho...@poteau.com wrote: Following the last couple of weeks of exchange between Craig and John Clark... Interesting. I would say John has the edge. And I have some comments... Does a Free Willer believe they willed themselves into existence in this Universe? Some might, but I don't. They seem to think this free will has some ability to manipulate the Universe in ways that avoid it's laws. Free will is one of the laws of the universe. We are made of the universe, therefore whatever we do or can do is inherently a potential of the universe. I don't believe I willed myself into existence. I cannot will myself to avoid the end of my existence. While I'm here I cannot break any of the laws of the Universe. You don't break the laws, you make new laws. The law of the universe was once 'human beings cannot fly'. We are all molecular machines. Then molecular machines are also us and molecules are telepathic. Those molecules operate within the laws of the Universe. We wouldn't know. We only experience molecules indirectly through our instrument-extended perception. What we see of molecules is even less than what an alien astronomer would see looking at the grey patches of human mold growing on the land surfaces of the Earth. The result of their action allows me to think and reason and decide on a course of action, execute a will so to speak, but that will is determined by the sequence of events of the molecules that make up my self. If I move my arm, I directly move it. I don't even need to cognitively 'decide' to move it, I just move the whole arm all at once from my point of view on my native scale of perception. That there are molecules, cells and tissues which make up my brain and body is a fact of a different layer, a different perceptual inertial frame where I don't exist at all. The fact remains though, that I can move my arm at will, and whatever molecular processes need to happen to fulfill my intention will be compelled to happen. That's why there is a difference between voluntary muscles and involuntary muscles. Some I control, some I don't, some control me. To say free will implies that I somehow avoided the laws of the Universe and resulting cause and effect. Free from the laws of the Universe. No, just free from automatism. If you look at the patterns of low level inorganic matter and distill the most simplistic mathematical patterns within that, and then consider them the only 'laws of the Universe' then you succumb to the cognitive bias of mechanemorphism. The laws of inorganic matter cannot be applied to meaning and awareness. In that sense, there is no such thing as free will, only will, that is determined by your physical being and sequence of molecular action. Where would sequences of molecular action get a sense of 'will' from? It doesn't make sense. Now I myself believe that probably the laws of the Universe allow it to be non-deterministic. My logic might be simple on this, but if there were no randomness at all, there could be no evolution of the Universe (and probably the laws of the Universe) to become the Universe we observe today. I think if we started (over and over again) with the same initial condition of this moment, that the next moment could be any number of potential outcomes, all within the same laws of the same Universe. The Universe is built upon the laws of probability, What are the laws of probability built on? and at the short term macro level things can be fairly predictable, but at the micro level and over long periods of time, things are not so predictable, due to random events at the quantum level. I also subscribe to the idea that all possible outcomes exist simultaneously and forever, as do all possible histories. If it is possible for it to exist, it exists, and always can exist. Else it would be impossible, and not exist. I doubt anything like this could ever be proven, but it makes logical sense to me. But I do not see that this non-deterministic quality of the Universe in any way creates a free will. It just makes the Universe really infinite in possibilities. Will cannot be executed without cause. Even if the result of that process of executing a will was at some point affected by a random quantum event. What you have written here...were you a helpless spectator to the event of it being written deterministically or was it random? Why do you have any more awareness of it than you have of peristalsis or your hair growing? Craig -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
Does a Free Willer believe they willed themselves into existence in this Universe? Some can believe that. Open question in comp. Actually this universe is a quite vague concept with comp. Don't know comp. As far as I'm concerned, universe can be everything, all permutations. I don't believe there is a mind separate from body. You don't have a mind (or a soul, or whatever metaphysical description of consciousness one might subscribe to) until you have the matter and energy arranged to form the mind. I know matter is a mental concept but yeah, whatever makes up the calculation of that stuff we perceive as matter and energy. When that comes together, you have a mind, and at some point that mind develops a will, but not the other way around. They seem to think this free will has some ability to manipulate the Universe in ways that avoid it's laws. Not the compatibilist one. I think free will is not prevented at all by determinism. I agree, will (free has no meaning to me) is enabled by determinism. If there were no process of cause/effect then there could be no calculation of will. I don't believe I willed myself into existence. I cannot will myself to avoid the end of my existence. If that exists. Again my existence is quite a vague notion. Basically I'm saying existence is needed before a will can exist, not the other way around. You have to build the computer before you can execute a program, not the other way around. While I'm here I cannot break any of the laws of the Universe. We are all molecular machines. Locally, that is very plausible, but near death, this is no more assured unless you introduce actual infinities in bith matter and mind, and some link between. We are not bodies, we own bodies. Molecules are clothes, and actually they are map of our most probable computations in arithmetic. This is a consequence of the idea that we are machines. It makes materialism wrong eventually. Matter is a mind construction. We are the program which does not exist without the machine (computer). Those molecules operate within the laws of the Universe. If that exists. Locally, it is true, but not globally. Locally and currently, yes, I understand. The result of their action allows me to think and reason and decide on a course of action, execute a will so to speak, but that will is determined by the sequence of events of the molecules that make up my self. To say free will implies that I somehow avoided the laws of the Universe and resulting cause and effect. Free from the laws of the Universe. In that sense, there is no such thing as free will, only will, that is determined by your physical being and sequence of molecular action. OK. Locally. Now I myself believe that probably the laws of the Universe allow it to be non-deterministic. My logic might be simple on this, but if there were no randomness at all, there could be no evolution of the Universe (and probably the laws of the Universe) to become the Universe we observe today. I think if we started (over and over again) with the same initial condition of this moment, that the next moment could be any number of potential outcomes, all within the same laws of the same Universe. The Universe is built upon the laws of probability, and at the short term macro level things can be fairly predictable, but at the micro level and over long periods of time, things are not so predictable, due to random events at the quantum level. I also subscribe to the idea that all possible outcomes exist simultaneously and forever, as do all possible histories. OK. But with different probabilities, and we can manage them from inside. Yes I understand. We can manage to an extent. There are probable outcomes of our attempts at managing. If restarted with all same initial conditions, our same attempt at managing the probable outcome may result in a different outcome. (Many with equal probability, some not so probable). At any instant in time I think multiple outcomes emerge in the next instant, each just as real to the observer/manager. Or should I say observers/managers, as there are multiple of these for each multiple outcome. A good thing to avoid sending to a gibberish message. I didn't catch the intent of this statement. Maybe I did. Snipped the rest as we seem to agree on the rest. - Roy -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On Jun 1, 12:27 pm, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 6/1/2012 8:12 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: They seem to think this free will has some ability to manipulate the Universe in ways that avoid it's laws. Not the compatibilist one. I think free will is not prevented at all by determinism. It just boils down to how you want to define 'free will'. The definition is purposeful and free of coercion is important because it plays a part in social judgement and legal assignment of responsibility. Determinism is thought to be inconsistent with responsibility because some cause outside yourself doesn't count as your responsibility; but given determinism each of your actions can be traced back to causes outside yourself, even to before your birth. Brent Social judgement and such are all human constructs. What is physically behind free will? The programming of our human mind affects the choices we make. We choose to call heads, or we choose to call tails. What is behind our choice? Our complex system of memories and information, current physical cues, etc, all will go into our decision.. we feel the power to make the call whichever way we choose, but that feeling comes from our internal program developed and shaped by our life history. It was determined by our past and our current information. In the instant we make the call, we could be teetering on the very edge of probability, we could go either way, and some quantum event could be just the slightest push needed to have us fall on one side of the fence or the other, in making that call. Replay the same event over again, and we just might make the opposite call, and write a different number in on our lotto ticket, and end up a million dollars richer rather than a dollar short, affecting the rest of our lives so much differently. Free will, or will, is the feeling of having a choice, regardless of the ultimate outcome. What shapes our choice is the deterministic quality of our universe. We have a choice but that choice is determined by all events leading up to that choice. The choice can be between a multitude of potential possibilities, any of which we can make real. All of which are real, to the observer in that particular future. Somehow that gives us a sense of free will. An illusion of free will. Just like the illusion of time. I've come to believe there was no beginning and no end to the universe (universe defined by everything possible), it has always existed and will always exist. It is the set of all possible states, all possible computations. This life I'm leading has been there forever, has played out forever, and every possible variation of it has played out forever, as has every other possible existence, from the lowest form of life to the most intelligent possible. A universe short of infinite might as well be nothing. A large but fixed number of possibilities is about as boring as having only smallest number of possibilities, white versus black, on versus off. The universe should have been nothing at all, or it should be infinite, for me there is no in between. Infinite does not imply there are no impossibilities. Just that the number of possible computations is infinite. Anyway, that's my feeling. Subject to change without notice. -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On Jun 1, 1:31 pm, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: On May 31, 6:14 pm, RMahoney rmaho...@poteau.com wrote: They seem to think this free will has some ability to manipulate the Universe in ways that avoid it's laws. Free will is one of the laws of the universe. We are made of the universe, therefore whatever we do or can do is inherently a potential of the universe. Free will is not a basic law or building block of the universe. The sense of free will is a result of the process of the universe. I don't believe I willed myself into existence. I cannot will myself to avoid the end of my existence. While I'm here I cannot break any of the laws of the Universe. You don't break the laws, you make new laws. The law of the universe was once 'human beings cannot fly'. Laws of the universe I'm referring to are the real laws, not human's attempt at defining them. Human beings cannot fly is a human thought, not a law. We are all molecular machines. Then molecular machines are also us and molecules are telepathic. Systems of molecules and energy can transmit information across distances, so? Those molecules operate within the laws of the Universe. We wouldn't know. We only experience molecules indirectly through our instrument-extended perception. What we see of molecules is even less than what an alien astronomer would see looking at the grey patches of human mold growing on the land surfaces of the Earth. The result of their action allows me to think and reason and decide on a course of action, execute a will so to speak, but that will is determined by the sequence of events of the molecules that make up my self. If I move my arm, I directly move it. I don't even need to cognitively 'decide' to move it, I just move the whole arm all at once from my point of view on my native scale of perception. That there are molecules, cells and tissues which make up my brain and body is a fact of a different layer, a different perceptual inertial frame where I don't exist at all. The fact remains though, that I can move my arm at will, and whatever molecular processes need to happen to fulfill my intention will be compelled to happen. That's why there is a difference between voluntary muscles and involuntary muscles. Some I control, some I don't, some control me. There is the molecular process that occurs when you command movement, but there is also the molecular and electrical process that occurs to develop that command. It doesn't happen out of thin air. To say free will implies that I somehow avoided the laws of the Universe and resulting cause and effect. Free from the laws of the Universe. No, just free from automatism. If you look at the patterns of low level inorganic matter and distill the most simplistic mathematical patterns within that, and then consider them the only 'laws of the Universe' then you succumb to the cognitive bias of mechanemorphism. The laws of inorganic matter cannot be applied to meaning and awareness. There is no such thing as magic. A computer program can become self aware, and obtain the sense of a free will. In that sense, there is no such thing as free will, only will, that is determined by your physical being and sequence of molecular action. Where would sequences of molecular action get a sense of 'will' from? It doesn't make sense. The molecular and electrical action creates a closed loop system of action and observation of it's action, and resulting adjustment of it's action. It is a program with a broad matrix of inputs and outputs. That matrix of senses is consciousness. Molecular action doesn't get a sense of will, it creates a sense of will. Therefore, it does, make, sense. Now I myself believe that probably the laws of the Universe allow it to be non-deterministic. My logic might be simple on this, but if there were no randomness at all, there could be no evolution of the Universe (and probably the laws of the Universe) to become the Universe we observe today. I think if we started (over and over again) with the same initial condition of this moment, that the next moment could be any number of potential outcomes, all within the same laws of the same Universe. The Universe is built upon the laws of probability, What are the laws of probability built on? Mathematics. Quanta. and at the short term macro level things can be fairly predictable, but at the micro level and over long periods of time, things are not so predictable, due to random events at the quantum level. I also subscribe to the idea that all possible outcomes exist simultaneously and forever, as do all possible histories. If it is possible for it to exist, it exists, and always can exist. Else it would be impossible, and not exist. I doubt anything like this could ever be proven, but it makes logical sense to me. But I do not see that this non-deterministic quality of the
Re: Free will in MWI
On Jun 1, 7:07 pm, RMahoney rmaho...@poteau.com wrote: On Jun 1, 1:31 pm, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: On May 31, 6:14 pm, RMahoney rmaho...@poteau.com wrote: They seem to think this free will has some ability to manipulate the Universe in ways that avoid it's laws. Free will is one of the laws of the universe. We are made of the universe, therefore whatever we do or can do is inherently a potential of the universe. Free will is not a basic law or building block of the universe. The sense of free will is a result of the process of the universe. I used to think that too, but why should a 'sense of free' will be the result of any process in any universe? What would it accomplish? What process would produce it? I don't believe I willed myself into existence. I cannot will myself to avoid the end of my existence. While I'm here I cannot break any of the laws of the Universe. You don't break the laws, you make new laws. The law of the universe was once 'human beings cannot fly'. Laws of the universe I'm referring to are the real laws, not human's attempt at defining them. Human beings cannot fly is a human thought, not a law. All laws that we understand are necessarily defined by humans. They are our interpretations of observations using our senses, our body, and instruments which we have designed with our senses to extend our human body and human mind. If there is any truly real law, it is that our understanding of what they are gets rewritten frequently. We are all molecular machines. Then molecular machines are also us and molecules are telepathic. Systems of molecules and energy can transmit information across distances, so? Not information. Feelings. Thoughts. Images. Comedy. Irony. Human life. A bar graph is information. Getting your molars ripped out with a pair of pliers is more different. Those molecules operate within the laws of the Universe. We wouldn't know. We only experience molecules indirectly through our instrument-extended perception. What we see of molecules is even less than what an alien astronomer would see looking at the grey patches of human mold growing on the land surfaces of the Earth. The result of their action allows me to think and reason and decide on a course of action, execute a will so to speak, but that will is determined by the sequence of events of the molecules that make up my self. If I move my arm, I directly move it. I don't even need to cognitively 'decide' to move it, I just move the whole arm all at once from my point of view on my native scale of perception. That there are molecules, cells and tissues which make up my brain and body is a fact of a different layer, a different perceptual inertial frame where I don't exist at all. The fact remains though, that I can move my arm at will, and whatever molecular processes need to happen to fulfill my intention will be compelled to happen. That's why there is a difference between voluntary muscles and involuntary muscles. Some I control, some I don't, some control me. There is the molecular process that occurs when you command movement, but there is also the molecular and electrical process that occurs to develop that command. It doesn't happen out of thin air. It happens out of my active participation in the semantic context of myself and my world. It happens out of desire, purpose, whim, intuition. I command my brain directly. It is top-down as well as bottom up. You are assuming bottom up only which would posit the tortured reasoning of neurons moving my arm for some evolutionary or biochemical reason...which is not true. If it were true, it would be easy to tell because we would have no division of voluntary and involuntary muscle tissue in our body. It would all be automatic. To say free will implies that I somehow avoided the laws of the Universe and resulting cause and effect. Free from the laws of the Universe. No, just free from automatism. If you look at the patterns of low level inorganic matter and distill the most simplistic mathematical patterns within that, and then consider them the only 'laws of the Universe' then you succumb to the cognitive bias of mechanemorphism. The laws of inorganic matter cannot be applied to meaning and awareness. There is no such thing as magic. Imagination is pretty close to magic and it is part of the universe. A computer program can become self aware, and obtain the sense of a free will. No byte of information has ever felt anything or done anything by itself. No program will ever obtain any sense of free will. We may fool ourselves into projecting our own free will onto it, as we do with stuffed animals and good luck charms, but a program has no reality. It's a sophisticated recording. In that sense, there is no such thing as free will, only will, that is determined by your physical being
Re: Free will in MWI
On Wed, May 30, 2012 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: You are the source. You cause it to be written And if nothing caused me to write it, if there was no reason for it, then somebody would have to be a fool to waste their time in reading it. Writing without a reason is gibberish and only a idiot reads gibberish, or writes it. John K Clark -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 31, 3:49 pm, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: There were reasons behind Lewis Carroll's writings and so what he wrote was nonsense not gibberish; I do six impossible things before breakfast is nonsense, sdfgsaiywjevry66baq is gibberish, as is free will. Except that sdfgsaiywjevry66baq is not in every dictionary of the English language that exists, but free will is. It's not a term that is looked up very often though probably, since everyone except you knows exactly what it means already. Craig -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On 5/31/2012 1:41 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 31, 3:49 pm, John Clarkjohnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: There were reasons behind Lewis Carroll's writings and so what he wrote was nonsense not gibberish; I do six impossible things before breakfast is nonsense, sdfgsaiywjevry66baq is gibberish, as is free will. Except that sdfgsaiywjevry66baq is not in every dictionary of the English language that exists, but free will is. It's not a term that is looked up very often though probably, since everyone except you knows exactly what it means already. Sam Harris just wrote a short book titled Free Will and from the comments it has elicited it's apparent that there is very little agreement as to what it means. Sam, for example, rejects compatibilist free will (e.g. as defended by Daniel Dennett) because he says 'free will' decisions must be conscious decisions. 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 31, 5:12 pm, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/31/2012 1:41 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 31, 3:49 pm, John Clarkjohnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: There were reasons behind Lewis Carroll's writings and so what he wrote was nonsense not gibberish; I do six impossible things before breakfast is nonsense, sdfgsaiywjevry66baq is gibberish, as is free will. Except that sdfgsaiywjevry66baq is not in every dictionary of the English language that exists, but free will is. It's not a term that is looked up very often though probably, since everyone except you knows exactly what it means already. Sam Harris just wrote a short book titled Free Will and from the comments it has elicited it's apparent that there is very little agreement as to what it means. Sam, for example, rejects compatibilist free will (e.g. as defended by Daniel Dennett) because he says 'free will' decisions must be conscious decisions. There is very little agreement among philosophers as to what anything means though. They don't count as 'everyone' ;) Craig -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
Following the last couple of weeks of exchange between Craig and John Clark... Interesting. I would say John has the edge. And I have some comments... Does a Free Willer believe they willed themselves into existence in this Universe? They seem to think this free will has some ability to manipulate the Universe in ways that avoid it's laws. I don't believe I willed myself into existence. I cannot will myself to avoid the end of my existence. While I'm here I cannot break any of the laws of the Universe. We are all molecular machines. Those molecules operate within the laws of the Universe. The result of their action allows me to think and reason and decide on a course of action, execute a will so to speak, but that will is determined by the sequence of events of the molecules that make up my self. To say free will implies that I somehow avoided the laws of the Universe and resulting cause and effect. Free from the laws of the Universe. In that sense, there is no such thing as free will, only will, that is determined by your physical being and sequence of molecular action. Now I myself believe that probably the laws of the Universe allow it to be non-deterministic. My logic might be simple on this, but if there were no randomness at all, there could be no evolution of the Universe (and probably the laws of the Universe) to become the Universe we observe today. I think if we started (over and over again) with the same initial condition of this moment, that the next moment could be any number of potential outcomes, all within the same laws of the same Universe. The Universe is built upon the laws of probability, and at the short term macro level things can be fairly predictable, but at the micro level and over long periods of time, things are not so predictable, due to random events at the quantum level. I also subscribe to the idea that all possible outcomes exist simultaneously and forever, as do all possible histories. If it is possible for it to exist, it exists, and always can exist. Else it would be impossible, and not exist. I doubt anything like this could ever be proven, but it makes logical sense to me. But I do not see that this non-deterministic quality of the Universe in any way creates a free will. It just makes the Universe really infinite in possibilities. Will cannot be executed without cause. Even if the result of that process of executing a will was at some point affected by a random quantum event. - Roy -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 28, 1:40 pm, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 27, 2012 at 2:04 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: Did I ever once say that free will means acting for no reason? That is a very hard question to answer, you said that people don't do things for a reason but you also said people don't don't do things for a reason, so is that one reason or two reasons or a infinite number of reasons or no reason at all? Who can say? Trying to answer a gibberish question is futile. I only say that reason is irrelevant I agree that reason is of no help whatsoever in understanding your arguments. I'm not asking what caused you to write, I'm asking why you caused that to be written. ^^^ So you want to know why; that is to say you think I'm a middle man and something cause me to cause No. Just the opposite. You are the source. You cause it to be written by writing it yourself. You are saying that you are a middle man - a passive figurehead between all of the universes reasons and the meaningless writing which you observe. Craig that to be written and you want to know what that something is, and you think that if I can not identify what that something is then my argument is idiotic. In other words despite what you say your actions prove that you assume I'm either as mechanical as a cuckoo clock or a complete idiot. I agree with you, smart people do things for reasons and dumb people and maniacs do things for no reason. John K Clark -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On Sun, May 27, 2012 at 2:04 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: Did I ever once say that free will means acting for no reason? That is a very hard question to answer, you said that people don't do things for a reason but you also said people don't don't do things for a reason, so is that one reason or two reasons or a infinite number of reasons or no reason at all? Who can say? Trying to answer a gibberish question is futile. I only say that reason is irrelevant I agree that reason is of no help whatsoever in understanding your arguments. I'm not asking what caused you to write, I'm asking why you caused that to be written. ^^^ So you want to know why; that is to say you think I'm a middle man and something cause me to cause that to be written and you want to know what that something is, and you think that if I can not identify what that something is then my argument is idiotic. In other words despite what you say your actions prove that you assume I'm either as mechanical as a cuckoo clock or a complete idiot. I agree with you, smart people do things for reasons and dumb people and maniacs do things for no reason. John K Clark -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 26, 1:42 pm, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, May 26, 2012 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: I nominate does not 'happen for a reason' Then what you nominate is as random as it is idiotic. Idiots do things for no reason, smart people do things for reasons. How does being an idiot allow you to to things for no reason? Does low intelligence make you exempt from determinism? the reason happens for my nomination. Read that again and explain to me what the hell it means. It means that If I nominate Bob for president, then the reason that Bob is in the presidential race now is because I nominated him. It's pretty straightforward. Read Bruno's answer. Free will is just will with degrees of freedom. So free will is a will that is free and a klogknee backstanator is a backstanator that is klogknee. Now you claim not to understand either words will or free? This sophistry appears to be malignant. What is wrong with that? I admit it's true, all circular definitions are true, but they are somewhat lacking in usefulness. How could you know whether it's circular or not when you claim not to understand either term? If you are trapped in a cage, you have will but not a lot of free will. Why is that so difficult to admit? I admit that if I'm trapped in a cage I can't do what my will wants me to do, and I admit that whatever it is my will wants me to do it does so for a reason or it does not. But you can't do what your will wants you to do anyways even outside of a cage. Doing or not doing what your will wants you to do is free will. When that power to decide is taken away by a cage, what has been lost? Freedom. Without free will, there could be no important distinction between being a slave and being free. Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII string free will means and neither do you. You stand corrected. I suspect that I may have solved the hard problem of consciousness. I'll alert the press. They have been alerted already. I'm doing a radio show on Tuesday. I admit that some things happen for no reason, some things are random. So your opinions are random. That's not what I said. Why debate them? Again you're asking me the reasons I do things, you're demanding to know what caused me to do stuff, but this time you're asking the reason there is no reason and I have no reasonable answer except that's the way my brain is wired. Yes, your brain is wired to support free will. you are colorblind to free will, Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII string free will means and neither do you. How do you know what I know? Are you telepathic? you will have to take my word in all matters relating to free will. NO you are entirely wrong, I don't have to do any such thing. I choose not to take your word You can't choose whether to choose to take my word or not, you have no free will. You are a puppet of any force that happens to run across the algorithm that you are. on the merits of that silly free will noise; and of one thing you can be absolutely certain, I made that choice for a reason or I made that choice for no reason. Then it wasn't you who was making a choice. The reason made the choice and it made you believe you made it. You aren't allowed to say that you make choices. It doesn't matter what the reason is. If there really is a reason then it's deterministic if there is no reason then it's random. If you don't know what the reason is, then how can you claim that reason must be deterministic. Because the defining characteristic of reason is determinism, if you get a different output every time you feed in the identical input then it's not reason and it's not deterministic. It can also be just the opposite. If you ask Rain Man a question and he responds by reciting 'Who's on First' every time, that doesn't make it a reasonable answer, it makes it an autistic reflex. conditions don't give water much opportunity to express anything like free will. Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII string free will means and neither do you. Speaking of autistic reflexes. In what possible way is that not free will? Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII string free will means and neither do you. The telepathic autistic wins again...in his mind. my free will determines what is deterministic. Then if this thing called free will determines that jumping off the 40'th floor will not deterministically cause you to turn into a greasy splat on the sidewalk far below then it would be safe to make such a jump. Good luck with that. Free will doesn't have to determine everything in the universe, just determining how my brain operates the voluntary muscles of my body is enough. Craig -- 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
Re: Free will in MWI
On Sun, May 27, 2012 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: Now you claim not to understand either words will or free? How could you know whether it's circular or not when you claim not to understand either term? When that power to decide is taken away by a cage, what has been lost? How do you know what I know? Are you telepathic? You believe that one of the many self-contradictory attributes that this thing called free will gives people is the ability to do things for no reason and you think that is wonderful, so it's surprising you should ask so many questions about what CAUSED me to write what I wrote. I'm doing a radio show on Tuesday. You arn't the first and won't be the last to peddle gibberish on the radio. You can't choose whether to choose to take my word or not, you have no free will. You are a puppet of any force that happens to run across the algorithm that you are. it wasn't you who was making a choice. The reason made the choice and it made you believe you made it. So now you have discovered a new thing you can talk about on your radio show: if Craig Weinberg finds that a particular fact about the universe is unpleasant to him then that fact can not be true. your brain is wired to support free will. Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII string free will means and neither do you. Free will doesn't have to determine everything in the universe, just determining how my brain operates the voluntary muscles of my body is enough. Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII string free will means and neither do you. John K Clark -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 27, 1:44 pm, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 27, 2012 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: Now you claim not to understand either words will or free? How could you know whether it's circular or not when you claim not to understand either term? When that power to decide is taken away by a cage, what has been lost? How do you know what I know? Are you telepathic? You believe that one of the many self-contradictory attributes that this thing called free will gives people is the ability to do things for no reason Did I ever once say that free will means acting for no reason? I only say that reason is irrelevant and cannot explain the fact that there is a difference between freely exercising your will and being a impotent spectator held hostage in your own mind. and you think that is wonderful, so it's surprising you should ask so many questions about what CAUSED me to write what I wrote. I'm not asking what caused you to write, I'm asking why you caused that to be written. I'm doing a radio show on Tuesday. You arn't the first and won't be the last to peddle gibberish on the radio. I'm not selling anything so I can't really be peddling. You can't choose whether to choose to take my word or not, you have no free will. You are a puppet of any force that happens to run across the algorithm that you are. it wasn't you who was making a choice. The reason made the choice and it made you believe you made it. So now you have discovered a new thing you can talk about on your radio show: if Craig Weinberg finds that a particular fact about the universe is unpleasant to him then that fact can not be true. I could just talk about them as if they weren't facts and pretend I don't understand their meaning instead, like some other people. your brain is wired to support free will. Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII string free will means and neither do you. See previous. Free will doesn't have to determine everything in the universe, just determining how my brain operates the voluntary muscles of my body is enough. Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII string free will means and neither do you. See previous. Craig -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 25, 4:59 pm, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 24, 2012 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: My doing the nomination is the reason for the reasons. And the reason for the reasons that you nominated in the way you did had a reason or it did not. No, what I nominate does not 'happen for a reason', the reason happens for my nomination. I use reasons also, they do not just use me. That doesn't necessarily mean that I wouldn't continue to enjoy free will. Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII string free will means. Then you admit what I say is true. I have said from the start that we make determinations. Good. We make them with our free will. I don't know what free will means but I do know that determinations are determined, and it they are determined they are deterministic. Read Bruno's answer. Free will is just will with degrees of freedom. What is wrong with that? If you are trapped in a cage, you have will but not a lot of free will. Why is that so difficult to admit? If you are not a slave you have more freedom - your will is more free than someone who has been abducted as a slave. A slave has no less will than a non-slave, but they have less opportunity to use it and thus are not 'free' to use their free will. Without free will, there could be no important distinction between being a slave and being free. The question is not whether free will is deterministic or not - it is clearly both, and clearly neither. The question is what is determination in the first place? there is always the third answer when it comes to free will. Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII string free will means. Then you admit I'm right again. It's like this. If you are the color yellow, and all yellow is you, then your universe will consist only of shades of blue and red. You can't see yourself so you say 'yellow is nonsense'. I see. Perhaps I could summarize your above statement this way: T was brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. Wow, I really don't think that was difficult to grasp. What part of it seems confusing? No, I actually have already unlocked the secrets of the universe. I could care less if anyone else knows it. I am sharing what I have found as a service to others who are interested. That is remarkable, you really believe you are the first one to generate reams of untestable self-contradictory useless downright silly words about the free will noise. No, I suspect that I may have solved the hard problem of consciousness. Why does the wiring of your brain want you to take credit for 'personally thinking'? If there are reasons your brain is wired the way it is they are heredity and environment, if there were no reasons then it was random. The holy trinity of mechanemorphism. It is unfalsifiable and begs the question to say that since I know that everything that is random or determined, then everything must be random or determined. It is religious fanaticism. I want you to admit that your reasons are your own Why are they just my reasons? Other people (not you certainly) have used those very same reasons, some used them before I did and some used them to greater effect than I did. But you choose to make them yours, do you not? and not determined for you exclusively by foreign elements. I admit that without hesitation, I admit that some things happen for no reason, some things are random. So your opinions are random. Why debate them? What's it to you whether the reasons that have washed up randomly in your brain are different than those in others minds? You are certainly deterministic in part, and you certainly have free will. Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII string free will means. Then you concede my point. Since you are colorblind to free will, you will have to take my word in all matters relating to free will. You are not qualified to have an opinion. It may be the case that nothing is random in an absolute sense. I doubt it but if true then everything is deterministic, although even then you wouldn't know what you are going to do next until you do it, and the only way to know what some Turing Machines will do is watch it and see. You assume that it's not possible to see a year or a century at a time. How do you know that your future isn't already happening in someone else's present? Don't you see that you are using free will right now? No I don't see because I don't know what the ASCII string free will means and neither do you. Of course I do. Everyone except you knows what free will is. Children. People with Alzheimers and brain injuries. Tribesmen in New Guinea. There is a term for it in every language on Earth. What do you mean by 'I don't want'? I will take action to try to ensure that the event does not take place. Why and how would you do
Re: Free will in MWI
On Sat, May 26, 2012 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: I nominate does not 'happen for a reason' Then what you nominate is as random as it is idiotic. Idiots do things for no reason, smart people do things for reasons. the reason happens for my nomination. Read that again and explain to me what the hell it means. Read Bruno's answer. Free will is just will with degrees of freedom. So free will is a will that is free and a klogknee backstanator is a backstanator that is klogknee. What is wrong with that? I admit it's true, all circular definitions are true, but they are somewhat lacking in usefulness. If you are trapped in a cage, you have will but not a lot of free will. Why is that so difficult to admit? I admit that if I'm trapped in a cage I can't do what my will wants me to do, and I admit that whatever it is my will wants me to do it does so for a reason or it does not. Without free will, there could be no important distinction between being a slave and being free. Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII string free will means and neither do you. I suspect that I may have solved the hard problem of consciousness. I'll alert the press. I admit that some things happen for no reason, some things are random. So your opinions are random. That's not what I said. Why debate them? Again you're asking me the reasons I do things, you're demanding to know what caused me to do stuff, but this time you're asking the reason there is no reason and I have no reasonable answer except that's the way my brain is wired. you are colorblind to free will, Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII string free will means and neither do you. you will have to take my word in all matters relating to free will. NO you are entirely wrong, I don't have to do any such thing. I choose not to take your word on the merits of that silly free will noise; and of one thing you can be absolutely certain, I made that choice for a reason or I made that choice for no reason. It doesn't matter what the reason is. If there really is a reason then it's deterministic if there is no reason then it's random. If you don't know what the reason is, then how can you claim that reason must be deterministic. Because the defining characteristic of reason is determinism, if you get a different output every time you feed in the identical input then it's not reason and it's not deterministic. conditions don't give water much opportunity to express anything like free will. Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII string free will means and neither do you. In what possible way is that not free will? Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII string free will means and neither do you. my free will determines what is deterministic. Then if this thing called free will determines that jumping off the 40'th floor will not deterministically cause you to turn into a greasy splat on the sidewalk far below then it would be safe to make such a jump. Good luck with that. John K Clark -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On 24 May 2012, at 22:27, John Clark wrote: On Thu, May 24, 2012 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: Reason is not nominating anyone by itself. I am doing the nominating Are you doing the nominations for a reason? There are only two possible answers. Reasons don't care what I nominate, but I do. And if you were constructed differently you would care about different reasons. In the sense that I make determinations, but if that's true than being deterministic means having free will, and so the word loses all meaning. Finely! I thought this day would never come but at last you start to get the point, at least for a instant. who can *generate new reasons themselves*. Did you generate new reasons for a reason? There are only two possible answers. rigid logic is not sufficient the phenomenological reality of the actual universe we inhabit. You don't know any science and now you admit you believe even logic is unimportant, and yet you still expect to unlock the secrets of the universe just by sitting in your armchair and thinking, and you don't even have to think very hard because the colloquial terms that are key to your ideas don't need to be put under a microscope. Well good luck with that little endeavor, you're going to need it. There is no such thing as winning or losing an argument without free will. I knew it could not last, for a instant you understood that the noise had no meaning but now you're right back to saying free will, and cows still say moo and ducks still say quack. You can say you had no reason for writing that but I know it isn't true Interesting, you may not think my reasons are good but you think they are reasons nevertheless; so you think I'm deterministic. I have free will to decide [...] Did you decide for a reason? There are only two possible answers. That sounds like you are making a free will choice A choice made for a reason or a choice made for no reason. There is no third alternative. out of a personal preference The reason I have that personal preference is because that's the way my brain is wired, or perhaps there was no reason at all and thus random. What reason do you have for wanting to take credit for 'personally thinking'? So you think I'm deterministic, you want to know what caused me to do what I did. Well, if there was a reason it was because that is the way my brain is wired, of course there may not have been a reason at all, it could have been random. What is this 'personally think' ASCII noise? From this and other things you have said I gather that you believe that thinking and the fact that things happen for a reason or the don't is contradictory, but I'll be damned if I understand why that is supposed to be true. I don't see the connection. What reason do you have to believe that? Once again you demand to know the cause of my belief, you want to know the reason behind it. Once again you assume I am deterministic, and no doubt in your next breath you will insist that I am not deterministic, and not random either! Don't you see that you are using free will to choose to deny free will? The idea is not good enough to deny, free will is so bad it's not even wrong. And I choose to say that free will is gibberish for a reason or I say free will is gibberish for no reason, there is no third alternative. The argument ended as soon as you said I don't want... I don't want for a reason or I don't want for no reason, there is no third alternative. I have reasons. Then you are deterministic. Reasons do not have me. I don't know what that means so this is a case where there may actually be a third alternative. Reasons do not have you for a reason, or reasons do not have you for no reason, or reasons do not have you is gibberish. You take consciousness for granted and then deny that it exists. What the hell are you talking about?? Consciousness is the one thing I'm absolutely certain of, my consciousness anyway, but I don't see what that has to do with the price of eggs, I thought we were discussing determinism and randomness. In the first place illusion is a perfectly real subjective phenomena and in the second place it's true, we really do want to do some things and not do other things. So then we agree, the feeling is real. Certainly. Do you imagine that meaning and intelligence are not part of the universe? No. We made the laws out of our own free will Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII string free will means. Whatever happens, happens. I think that's probably true, the alternative, whatever happens doesn't happen just does not ring true to me somehow. Why or how could anything try to interfere with that in a deterministic universe? The question is moot, the universe is not deterministic, some things happen for no reason. Then we are deterministic. Sure, but we also
Re: Free will in MWI
On Thu, May 24, 2012 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: My doing the nomination is the reason for the reasons. And the reason for the reasons that you nominated in the way you did had a reason or it did not. That doesn't necessarily mean that I wouldn't continue to enjoy free will. Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII string free will means. I have said from the start that we make determinations. Good. We make them with our free will. I don't know what free will means but I do know that determinations are determined, and it they are determined they are deterministic. there is always the third answer when it comes to free will. Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII string free will means. It's like this. If you are the color yellow, and all yellow is you, then your universe will consist only of shades of blue and red. You can't see yourself so you say 'yellow is nonsense'. I see. Perhaps I could summarize your above statement this way: T was brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. No, I actually have already unlocked the secrets of the universe. I could care less if anyone else knows it. I am sharing what I have found as a service to others who are interested. That is remarkable, you really believe you are the first one to generate reams of untestable self-contradictory useless downright silly words about the free will noise. Why does the wiring of your brain want you to take credit for 'personally thinking'? If there are reasons your brain is wired the way it is they are heredity and environment, if there were no reasons then it was random. I want you to admit that your reasons are your own Why are they just my reasons? Other people (not you certainly) have used those very same reasons, some used them before I did and some used them to greater effect than I did. and not determined for you exclusively by foreign elements. I admit that without hesitation, I admit that some things happen for no reason, some things are random. You are certainly deterministic in part, and you certainly have free will. Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII string free will means. It may be the case that nothing is random in an absolute sense. I doubt it but if true then everything is deterministic, although even then you wouldn't know what you are going to do next until you do it, and the only way to know what some Turing Machines will do is watch it and see. Don't you see that you are using free will right now? No I don't see because I don't know what the ASCII string free will means and neither do you. What do you mean by 'I don't want'? I will take action to try to ensure that the event does not take place. What is the reason for I? What is the reason for want? It doesn't matter what the reason is. If there really is a reason then it's deterministic if there is no reason then it's random. am I a car? No. Reasons don't have me because they don't exist independently of experience. And the reason a raindrop hit that specific spot on the ground is the complex experiences it had falling from the cloud to the earth. My free will is their reason. Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII string free will means. I buy you flowers and the reason for you getting flowers is my will to send them to you. Yes, you sent me flowers because of your will, you wanted to send me flowers and nothing prevented you from doing so thus you could act as your will ordered you to do. As to the question as to why you wanted to send me flowers, why your will was in that state it was in, there was a reason for that or there was not. They were beautiful by the way, thank you. The reason is my free will. Then whatever free will is it's deterministic. We are discussing free will. Which is the sole purpose of your consciousness. I don't know what the purpose of your consciousness is even supposed to mean, and I never knew what free will meant, so your statement is gibberish squared. So you don't deny that I am absolutely right. I couldn't fail to disagree with you less. Only a clear coherent non-contradictory idea can be right or wrong, you are neither. John K Clark -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 23, 1:54 pm, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, May 22, 2012 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: Nominated for a reason or nominated for no reason. Wrong. I am doing the nominating. You are doing the nominating for a reason or you are doing the nominating for no reason. Reason is not nominating anyone by itself. I am doing the nominating by reasoning. Reasons don't care what I nominate, but I do. I have many reasons Then you are deterministic. In the sense that I make determinations, but if that's true than being deterministic means having free will, and so the word loses all meaning. Many reasons do not make something less deterministic, it just makes it more complex; but if there were NO reasons then things really would be different, then things would be random. Many reasons is important because there is a conscious agent who can not only understand existing reasons and pick from among them, but who can *generate new reasons themselves*. I can create a new course of action And you created that new course of action for a reason (or reasons) in which case it was deterministic, OR you created that new course of action for no reason, not even one, in which case your action was random. I understand what you are saying completely. I understand that in theory it should make sense. What I have been telling you though, is that rigid logic is not sufficient the phenomenological reality of the actual universe we inhabit. You are literally thinking in black and white. In that metaphor, free will is the unquestionable existence of color. which cannot be reduced to 'for a reason or no reason'. There is only one thing that can not be reduced to X or not X, gibberish. There are many terms for that approach to thinking. I would call it epistemological fascism or Aristotelian reductionism. It's good for some things, but not everything, certainly not for explaining awareness itself. When you say I want to do some things and don't want to do other things how is that not free will? So, you demand to know what the reason was that caused me to write what I did. If I said I wrote that for no reason at all then I am certain you would interpret that as a admission that I had lost the argument. There is no such thing as winning or losing an argument without free will. I have reasons and you have yours and we are impotent spectators. There can be no argument. But you are a fan of the free will noise so I don't understand why me saying I had no reason for doing something would not satisfy you. You can say you had no reason for writing that but I know it isn't true, because I have free will to decide whether I trust my own sense or to accept an external position as my own. However I personally think it's bad form to write things for no reason, That sounds like you are making a free will choice out of a personal preference rather than involuntarily watching reasons do your writing for you. What is allowing you to do that? What reason do you have for wanting to take credit for 'personally thinking'? What is this 'personally think' ASCII noise? and so as it happens I did have a reason for writing what I wrote. The word will is not logically contradictory because I want to do something for a reason OR I want to do something for no reason. Who said that what you want to do matters? What reason do you have to believe that? Don't you see that you are using free will to choose to deny free will? In free will I don't want to do something for a reason AND I don't want to do something for no reason; and that's what makes the free will noise triple distilled extra virgin 100% pure GIBBERISH. Several people have tried to explain this to you here several times, but your ego is too invested in it. The argument ended as soon as you said I don't want... That is free will and nothing else. Do you say, 'these reasons want'? No, it's I who does the wanting and choosing and creating. I have reasons. Reasons do not have me. So the reason that caused my writing to differentiate between will and free will is that one is gibberish and the other is not. Without free will, there would be no difference between the two. You take consciousness for granted and then deny that it exists. You can argue that this feeling of wanting to do things is an illusion I honestly don't know what to make of that. In the first place illusion is a perfectly real subjective phenomena and in the second place it's true, we really do want to do some things and not do other things. So then we agree, the feeling is real. but that leaves the problem of what would be the point of such a feeling to exist in the universe that is purely deterministic. If the universe determines that my life has no meaning then the universe can kiss my ass because the universe is not in the meaning conveying business, intelligence is. Do you imagine that meaning and intelligence
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 23, 10:05 pm, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 5:28 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: There is obviously at least a small probability that you will decide to sleep under a bush tonight. Only because of how we have defined probability and our assumptions about what it possible. There is nothing to say those definitions and assumptions relate to something real. If it is absolutely certain that you won't sleep under a bush tonight then it is impossible that you will do so and the probability is zero. My understanding is that you don't approve of this sort of certain as you believe it leaves no room for free will or even consciousness. I approve of it completely as an exercise in abstraction, but yes, I am confident that a universe of probability alone cannot generate sense of any kind. You would have to admit that under your concept of free will, otherwise in a deterministic single universe you would be compelled to sleep in your bed, which I don't have a problem with but you do. In a deterministic multiverse, you will definitely sleep in your bed in most universes (loosely most if they are infinite in number) and definitely sleep under a bush in a few. You can't be sure in which type of universe you will end up in so the future is indeterminate. I understand the theory, and it would be interesting if we were in a theoretical universe, but ultimately it's absurd. It's Horton Hears A Who on crack. There would be a quintillion universes for every dust mite's turd's journey through the bed sheets. All it accomplishes is to find a way of arguing a way that everything in the universe is real except our own will is real. Somehow our ordinary experience is a magical exception because the idea of our decision making power makes us uncomfortable to explain. So are you saying that you don't believe in the multiverse or are you saying that the multiverse, if it were to exist, would leave no room for free will? I'm saying that if it existed its irrelevant, and that the only reason we are reaching for it is out of desperation with the inadequacy of our models. Without making sense the keystone of any model of realism, you will end up reaching for the unreal as a deus ex machina. No I understand the idea completely, I just think it's an obvious plug for the inconsistencies of QM. Like Dark matter dark energy, superposition, emergence, and entanglement. It's all phlogiston, libido, elan vital, animal magnetism, etc. It's quite nice in theory, but it sodomizes one side of Occam's Razor with the other. It's counter intuitive because it's an absurd way of explaining the universe in terms of nearly infinite nearly nonsensical universes. Every grain of sand on every planet in the cosmos having it's own set of universes customized to fit every pebble collision and sea tousled movement? Seriously? With sense as a primitive you don't need any of that. The universe is one thing with different views of itself. Each view doesn't need to be a creator of literal separate universes. Whether it's true or not is a separate question but it does allow for your future to be truly indeterminate in a deterministic multiverse. The teleportation thought experiments we often talk about here model this in a simpler way. But it does it by neutralizing any significance of one outcome over another. Why do we care about determining anything if we have no power to change it? It doesn't neutralise significance. In one universe you wake up in your bed and you tell yourself that you made a good decision, your bed is warm and comfortable and it would have been stupid to sleep under a bush. In another universe you wake up under a bush and you tell yourself that you made a good decision, even though you were cold and uncomfortable, because you have achieved your purpose of empathising better with homeless people. In each case you made your own decision, freely, with good reason and according to the laws of physics. Before you made the decision you were not completely sure which way you would go. Right now, you can say you're pretty sure you will wake up in your bed tomorrow and I would bet that that is what will happen, but you could change your mind. What point would there be to making any of those outcomes seem significant to us if every bad decision inevitably has its own universe anyhow, regardless of our choices? Craig -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On Thu, May 24, 2012 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: Reason is not nominating anyone by itself. I am doing the nominating Are you doing the nominations for a reason? There are only two possible answers. Reasons don't care what I nominate, but I do. And if you were constructed differently you would care about different reasons. In the sense that I make determinations, but if that's true than being deterministic means having free will, and so the word loses all meaning. Finely! I thought this day would never come but at last you start to get the point, at least for a instant. who can *generate new reasons themselves*. Did you generate new reasons for a reason? There are only two possible answers. rigid logic is not sufficient the phenomenological reality of the actual universe we inhabit. You don't know any science and now you admit you believe even logic is unimportant, and yet you still expect to unlock the secrets of the universe just by sitting in your armchair and thinking, and you don't even have to think very hard because the colloquial terms that are key to your ideas don't need to be put under a microscope. Well good luck with that little endeavor, you're going to need it. There is no such thing as winning or losing an argument without free will. I knew it could not last, for a instant you understood that the noise had no meaning but now you're right back to saying free will, and cows still say moo and ducks still say quack. You can say you had no reason for writing that but I know it isn't true Interesting, you may not think my reasons are good but you think they are reasons nevertheless; so you think I'm deterministic. I have free will to decide [...] Did you decide for a reason? There are only two possible answers. That sounds like you are making a free will choice A choice made for a reason or a choice made for no reason. There is no third alternative. out of a personal preference The reason I have that personal preference is because that's the way my brain is wired, or perhaps there was no reason at all and thus random. What reason do you have for wanting to take credit for 'personally thinking'? So you think I'm deterministic, you want to know what caused me to do what I did. Well, if there was a reason it was because that is the way my brain is wired, of course there may not have been a reason at all, it could have been random. What is this 'personally think' ASCII noise? From this and other things you have said I gather that you believe that thinking and the fact that things happen for a reason or the don't is contradictory, but I'll be damned if I understand why that is supposed to be true. I don't see the connection. What reason do you have to believe that? Once again you demand to know the cause of my belief, you want to know the reason behind it. Once again you assume I am deterministic, and no doubt in your next breath you will insist that I am not deterministic, and not random either! Don't you see that you are using free will to choose to deny free will? The idea is not good enough to deny, free will is so bad it's not even wrong. And I choose to say that free will is gibberish for a reason or I say free will is gibberish for no reason, there is no third alternative. The argument ended as soon as you said I don't want... I don't want for a reason or I don't want for no reason, there is no third alternative. I have reasons. Then you are deterministic. Reasons do not have me. I don't know what that means so this is a case where there may actually be a third alternative. Reasons do not have you for a reason, or reasons do not have you for no reason, or reasons do not have you is gibberish. You take consciousness for granted and then deny that it exists. What the hell are you talking about?? Consciousness is the one thing I'm absolutely certain of, my consciousness anyway, but I don't see what that has to do with the price of eggs, I thought we were discussing determinism and randomness. In the first place illusion is a perfectly real subjective phenomena and in the second place it's true, we really do want to do some things and not do other things. So then we agree, the feeling is real. Certainly. Do you imagine that meaning and intelligence are not part of the universe? No. We made the laws out of our own free will Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII string free will means. Whatever happens, happens. I think that's probably true, the alternative, whatever happens doesn't happen just does not ring true to me somehow. Why or how could anything try to interfere with that in a deterministic universe? The question is moot, the universe is not deterministic, some things happen for no reason. Then we are deterministic. Sure, but we also have free will. Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII string free will means. John K Clark -- You received this message
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 24, 4:27 pm, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 24, 2012 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: Reason is not nominating anyone by itself. I am doing the nominating Are you doing the nominations for a reason? There are only two possible answers. My doing the nomination is the reason for the reasons. You have it backwards and there are not only two possible answers. Reasons don't care what I nominate, but I do. And if you were constructed differently you would care about different reasons. Yes of course. That doesn't necessarily mean that I wouldn't continue to enjoy free will. My choices would have different ranges and limitations, so what? Some constructions may not be as conducive to expressing will than others, but where will is expressed, it is free will or it is nothing. In the sense that I make determinations, but if that's true than being deterministic means having free will, and so the word loses all meaning. Finely! I thought this day would never come but at last you start to get the point, at least for a instant. I have said from the start that we make determinations. We make them with our free will. who can *generate new reasons themselves*. Did you generate new reasons for a reason? There are only two possible answers. No, there is always the third answer when it comes to free will. It's like this. If you are the color yellow, and all yellow is you, then your universe will consist only of shades of blue and red. You can't see yourself so you say 'yellow is nonsense'. To understand my position, you would need to see that my description of the universe achieves a complete accounting of phenomenology, and not just the reductionist view from a hypothetically objective view. If I generate reasons, then *the reason needs me*, not the other way around. John Clark's reasons exist for a John Clark. You are their reason. See? You are part of the universe just as much as anything else. rigid logic is not sufficient the phenomenological reality of the actual universe we inhabit. You don't know any science and now you admit you believe even logic is unimportant, It's not unimportant at all, but it is impotent when it comes to explaining awareness or feeling. You accuse me of not thinking that jackhammers are important when we are talking about surgery. and yet you still expect to unlock the secrets of the universe just by sitting in your armchair and thinking, and you don't even have to think very hard because the colloquial terms that are key to your ideas don't need to be put under a microscope. Well good luck with that little endeavor, you're going to need it. No, I actually have already unlocked the secrets of the universe. I could care less if anyone else knows it. I am sharing what I have found as a service to others who are interested. There is no such thing as winning or losing an argument without free will. I knew it could not last, for a instant you understood that the noise had no meaning but now you're right back to saying free will, and cows still say moo and ducks still say quack. I hope, for your sake that you are under the age of 30. You can say you had no reason for writing that but I know it isn't true Interesting, you may not think my reasons are good but you think they are reasons nevertheless; so you think I'm deterministic. No. Your reasons arise from you. You are partially deterministic but writing something voluntarily is not an automatic action being imposed on you from outside. You have not been kidnapped by cartoon characters and forced to type words blindfolded. I have free will to decide [...] Did you decide for a reason? There are only two possible answers. See above, ad nauseum. That sounds like you are making a free will choice A choice made for a reason or a choice made for no reason. There is no third alternative. out of a personal preference The reason I have that personal preference is because that's the way my brain is wired, or perhaps there was no reason at all and thus random. What reason do you have for wanting to take credit for 'personally thinking'? So you think I'm deterministic, you want to know what caused me to do what I did. Well, if there was a reason it was because that is the way my brain is wired, of course there may not have been a reason at all, it could have been random. Why does the wiring of your brain want you to take credit for 'personally thinking'? What is this 'personally think' ASCII noise? From this and other things you have said I gather that you believe that thinking and the fact that things happen for a reason or the don't is contradictory, but I'll be damned if I understand why that is supposed to be true. I don't see the connection. I know you don't see the connection. That's the problem. What reason do you have to believe that? Once again you demand to know the cause of my belief,
Re: Free will in MWI
On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 1:12 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: If it is absolutely certain that you won't sleep under a bush tonight then it is impossible that you will do so and the probability is zero. My understanding is that you don't approve of this sort of certain as you believe it leaves no room for free will or even consciousness. I approve of it completely as an exercise in abstraction, but yes, I am confident that a universe of probability alone cannot generate sense of any kind. Probability alone cannot generate sense, for that you need a brain of some type. However, the brain must be either probabilistic or deterministic. You still haven't explained the third category, neither probabilistic nor deterministic. If I assert that I have special dice which are neither probabilistic nor deterministic, what am I asserting? How could we tell if I was telling the truth? It doesn't neutralise significance. In one universe you wake up in your bed and you tell yourself that you made a good decision, your bed is warm and comfortable and it would have been stupid to sleep under a bush. In another universe you wake up under a bush and you tell yourself that you made a good decision, even though you were cold and uncomfortable, because you have achieved your purpose of empathising better with homeless people. In each case you made your own decision, freely, with good reason and according to the laws of physics. Before you made the decision you were not completely sure which way you would go. Right now, you can say you're pretty sure you will wake up in your bed tomorrow and I would bet that that is what will happen, but you could change your mind. What point would there be to making any of those outcomes seem significant to us if every bad decision inevitably has its own universe anyhow, regardless of our choices? When I worry about a decision I worry about what sort of universe I will find myself in. In one universe I made a good decision and am happy, in another I made a bad decision and am unhappy. If I didn't worry about it, for example if I walked across the road without looking, then I am more likely to end up in a universe where I am unhappy. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On 5/24/2012 4:55 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 1:12 AM, Craig Weinbergwhatsons...@gmail.com wrote: If it is absolutely certain that you won't sleep under a bush tonight then it is impossible that you will do so and the probability is zero. My understanding is that you don't approve of this sort of certain as you believe it leaves no room for free will or even consciousness. I approve of it completely as an exercise in abstraction, but yes, I am confident that a universe of probability alone cannot generate sense of any kind. Probability alone cannot generate sense, for that you need a brain of some type. However, the brain must be either probabilistic or deterministic. You still haven't explained the third category, neither probabilistic nor deterministic. If I assert that I have special dice which are neither probabilistic nor deterministic, what am I asserting? How could we tell if I was telling the truth? Before Newton the idea that the world might be deterministic was hardly even comprehensible. It was generally supposed that events were partly determined by effective causes but they were also subject to the unpredictable influence of agents (like God and people). Randomness, before quantum mechanics, was just a way to model ignorance. So, to get to your question, what was neither probabilistic nor deterministic were 'agents'. Agents were recognized as being unpredictable but non-random in the sense of exhibiting purpose. Now we (except for Craig) recognize that these properties can be found in machines, like chess players or AI with learning. They can be either probabilistic (in the inherent sense by having QM random number generators) or deterministic but unpredictable simply because they are complex and learn from their experience. It doesn't neutralise significance. In one universe you wake up in your bed and you tell yourself that you made a good decision, your bed is warm and comfortable and it would have been stupid to sleep under a bush. In another universe you wake up under a bush and you tell yourself that you made a good decision, even though you were cold and uncomfortable, because you have achieved your purpose of empathising better with homeless people. In each case you made your own decision, freely, with good reason and according to the laws of physics. Before you made the decision you were not completely sure which way you would go. Right now, you can say you're pretty sure you will wake up in your bed tomorrow and I would bet that that is what will happen, but you could change your mind. What point would there be to making any of those outcomes seem significant to us if every bad decision inevitably has its own universe anyhow, regardless of our choices? When I worry about a decision I worry about what sort of universe I will find myself in. In one universe I made a good decision and am happy, in another I made a bad decision and am unhappy. If I didn't worry about it, for example if I walked across the road without looking, then I am more likely to end up in a universe where I am unhappy. But do you decide to worry or not? 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 24, 7:55 pm, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 1:12 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: If it is absolutely certain that you won't sleep under a bush tonight then it is impossible that you will do so and the probability is zero. My understanding is that you don't approve of this sort of certain as you believe it leaves no room for free will or even consciousness. I approve of it completely as an exercise in abstraction, but yes, I am confident that a universe of probability alone cannot generate sense of any kind. Probability alone cannot generate sense, for that you need a brain of some type. How do you know? Lots of living organisms don't have brains. Worms. Jellyfish. Bacteria that signal each other to act en masse. Sea anemones seem pretty sensitive to me. However, the brain must be either probabilistic or deterministic. It doesn't matter what the brain's limitations are. It seems to me that the psyche uses the brain like a tool. The brain is a 3-D shadow of an 8-D temporal phenomena. You still haven't explained the third category, neither probabilistic nor deterministic. If I assert that I have special dice which are neither probabilistic nor deterministic, what am I asserting? How could we tell if I was telling the truth? The third category is intention. It's quite ordinary and straightforward. Understood implicitly among all cultures and people. If you have special dice that determine their rolls intentionally, you could not tell the difference, but they could. That's because motive originates from within and is private. It doesn't neutralise significance. In one universe you wake up in your bed and you tell yourself that you made a good decision, your bed is warm and comfortable and it would have been stupid to sleep under a bush. In another universe you wake up under a bush and you tell yourself that you made a good decision, even though you were cold and uncomfortable, because you have achieved your purpose of empathising better with homeless people. In each case you made your own decision, freely, with good reason and according to the laws of physics. Before you made the decision you were not completely sure which way you would go. Right now, you can say you're pretty sure you will wake up in your bed tomorrow and I would bet that that is what will happen, but you could change your mind. What point would there be to making any of those outcomes seem significant to us if every bad decision inevitably has its own universe anyhow, regardless of our choices? When I worry about a decision I worry about what sort of universe I will find myself in. In one universe I made a good decision and am happy, in another I made a bad decision and am unhappy. If I didn't worry about it, for example if I walked across the road without looking, then I am more likely to end up in a universe where I am unhappy. But you just create millions of universes where you get hit by a car no matter what you decide. What would be the point of having a sense of a personal stake in this particular version of you? Craig -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 24, 9:54 pm, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: Now we (except for Craig) recognize that these properties can be found in machines, like chess players or AI with learning. They can be either probabilistic (in the inherent sense by having QM random number generators) or deterministic but unpredictable simply because they are complex and learn from their experience. I don't say that AI is without purpose, only that it is without it's own purpose. AI is a prosthetic extension of human intelligence. A learning AI has the purposes which have been programmed into it, but it cannot develop it's own purposes and agendas. A learning AI can only learn what we let it learn. That isn't meaningful intelligence, sentience, feeling, or agency. It's a pre-recorded logical algorithm superimposed on a low level inorganic substrate. Craig -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On 5/24/2012 9:24 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 24, 9:54 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: Now we (except for Craig) recognize that these properties can be found in machines, like chess players or AI with learning. They can be either probabilistic (in the inherent sense by having QM random number generators) or deterministic but unpredictable simply because they are complex and learn from their experience. I don't say that AI is without purpose, only that it is without it's own purpose. AI is a prosthetic extension of human intelligence. A learning AI has the purposes which have been programmed into it, but it cannot develop it's own purposes and agendas. And you are a NI that has been programmed by evolution. A learning AI can only learn what we let it learn. That isn't meaningful intelligence, sentience, feeling, or agency. It's a pre-recorded logical algorithm superimposed on a low level inorganic substrate. And it's meaningful that you are attracted to women? That you find shit repulsive? That you find babies cute? Brent Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills. --- Schopenhauer -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On 5/25/12, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: However, the brain must be either probabilistic or deterministic. It doesn't matter what the brain's limitations are. It seems to me that the psyche uses the brain like a tool. The brain is a 3-D shadow of an 8-D temporal phenomena. Without the psyche how would the brain behave differently? You still haven't explained the third category, neither probabilistic nor deterministic. If I assert that I have special dice which are neither probabilistic nor deterministic, what am I asserting? How could we tell if I was telling the truth? The third category is intention. It's quite ordinary and straightforward. Understood implicitly among all cultures and people. If you have special dice that determine their rolls intentionally, you could not tell the difference, but they could. That's because motive originates from within and is private. That's not a third category. Determined or probabilistic is a description of externally observable behaviour. So if you claim that you could not tell the difference with the special dice, you are admitting that intention is consistent with either determinism or randomness, which is what I have been saying all along. When I worry about a decision I worry about what sort of universe I will find myself in. In one universe I made a good decision and am happy, in another I made a bad decision and am unhappy. If I didn't worry about it, for example if I walked across the road without looking, then I am more likely to end up in a universe where I am unhappy. But you just create millions of universes where you get hit by a car no matter what you decide. What would be the point of having a sense of a personal stake in this particular version of you? I can only experience one universe at a time, so if I cross carefully I am more likely to experience a universe where I don't get hit. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On Tue, May 22, 2012 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: Nominated for a reason or nominated for no reason. Wrong. I am doing the nominating. You are doing the nominating for a reason or you are doing the nominating for no reason. I have many reasons Then you are deterministic. Many reasons do not make something less deterministic, it just makes it more complex; but if there were NO reasons then things really would be different, then things would be random. I can create a new course of action And you created that new course of action for a reason (or reasons) in which case it was deterministic, OR you created that new course of action for no reason, not even one, in which case your action was random. which cannot be reduced to 'for a reason or no reason'. There is only one thing that can not be reduced to X or not X, gibberish. When you say I want to do some things and don't want to do other things how is that not free will? So, you demand to know what the reason was that caused me to write what I did. If I said I wrote that for no reason at all then I am certain you would interpret that as a admission that I had lost the argument. But you are a fan of the free will noise so I don't understand why me saying I had no reason for doing something would not satisfy you. However I personally think it's bad form to write things for no reason, and so as it happens I did have a reason for writing what I wrote. The word will is not logically contradictory because I want to do something for a reason OR I want to do something for no reason. In free will I don't want to do something for a reason AND I don't want to do something for no reason; and that's what makes the free will noise triple distilled extra virgin 100% pure GIBBERISH. So the reason that caused my writing to differentiate between will and free will is that one is gibberish and the other is not. You can argue that this feeling of wanting to do things is an illusion I honestly don't know what to make of that. In the first place illusion is a perfectly real subjective phenomena and in the second place it's true, we really do want to do some things and not do other things. but that leaves the problem of what would be the point of such a feeling to exist in the universe that is purely deterministic. If the universe determines that my life has no meaning then the universe can kiss my ass because the universe is not in the meaning conveying business, intelligence is. A cloud of hydrogen gas a billion light years away can not give meaning to me but I can give meaning to it, and if the universe doesn't like that fact the universe can lump it. We interpret and execute the law Here we go again. We interpret and execute the law for a reason or we interpret and execute the law for no reason. There are laws we are compelled to observe and preserve Then we are deterministic. but the way we choose to do that [...] We choose the way we do that (and it does not matter what that is) for a reason or we choose the way we do that for no reason. John K Clark -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 5:28 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: There is obviously at least a small probability that you will decide to sleep under a bush tonight. Only because of how we have defined probability and our assumptions about what it possible. There is nothing to say those definitions and assumptions relate to something real. If it is absolutely certain that you won't sleep under a bush tonight then it is impossible that you will do so and the probability is zero. My understanding is that you don't approve of this sort of certain as you believe it leaves no room for free will or even consciousness. You would have to admit that under your concept of free will, otherwise in a deterministic single universe you would be compelled to sleep in your bed, which I don't have a problem with but you do. In a deterministic multiverse, you will definitely sleep in your bed in most universes (loosely most if they are infinite in number) and definitely sleep under a bush in a few. You can't be sure in which type of universe you will end up in so the future is indeterminate. I understand the theory, and it would be interesting if we were in a theoretical universe, but ultimately it's absurd. It's Horton Hears A Who on crack. There would be a quintillion universes for every dust mite's turd's journey through the bed sheets. All it accomplishes is to find a way of arguing a way that everything in the universe is real except our own will is real. Somehow our ordinary experience is a magical exception because the idea of our decision making power makes us uncomfortable to explain. So are you saying that you don't believe in the multiverse or are you saying that the multiverse, if it were to exist, would leave no room for free will? No I understand the idea completely, I just think it's an obvious plug for the inconsistencies of QM. Like Dark matter dark energy, superposition, emergence, and entanglement. It's all phlogiston, libido, elan vital, animal magnetism, etc. It's quite nice in theory, but it sodomizes one side of Occam's Razor with the other. It's counter intuitive because it's an absurd way of explaining the universe in terms of nearly infinite nearly nonsensical universes. Every grain of sand on every planet in the cosmos having it's own set of universes customized to fit every pebble collision and sea tousled movement? Seriously? With sense as a primitive you don't need any of that. The universe is one thing with different views of itself. Each view doesn't need to be a creator of literal separate universes. Whether it's true or not is a separate question but it does allow for your future to be truly indeterminate in a deterministic multiverse. The teleportation thought experiments we often talk about here model this in a simpler way. But it does it by neutralizing any significance of one outcome over another. Why do we care about determining anything if we have no power to change it? It doesn't neutralise significance. In one universe you wake up in your bed and you tell yourself that you made a good decision, your bed is warm and comfortable and it would have been stupid to sleep under a bush. In another universe you wake up under a bush and you tell yourself that you made a good decision, even though you were cold and uncomfortable, because you have achieved your purpose of empathising better with homeless people. In each case you made your own decision, freely, with good reason and according to the laws of physics. Before you made the decision you were not completely sure which way you would go. Right now, you can say you're pretty sure you will wake up in your bed tomorrow and I would bet that that is what will happen, but you could change your mind. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 1:52 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: In addition to approving of one presented option and disapproving of another, Approved for a reason or approved for no reason. free will allows us to nominate our own option for approval. Nominated for a reason or nominated for no reason. I don't see much of a difference between 'will' and 'free will'. The meaning of will is clear and its existence beyond dispute, I want to do some things and don't want to do other things. But free will means that simultaneously something happened for no reason and that same something did not happened for no reason; this is not even nonsense because there is no sense for it to be opposite to. The stories of Lewis Carroll are nonsense but they are not gibberish, the free will noise is gibberish. They are both colloquial Translation: Shallow. Not thought through. Vague. Ignorant. terms that don't need to be put under a microscope. Philosophers have been studying these terms for thousands of years without the use of modern tools like microscopes and logic and the scientific method, and that is why they have made precisely ZERO progress in all that time. All your posts could have been written by any philosophically minded well educated man living in 1000BC, but the thing is the human race has learned far more good philosophy since then, but not from philosophers. John K Clark -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 21, 7:44 pm, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 20, 2012 at 4:00 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: In a branching multiverse where all possibilities happen at a decision point, some versions of you decide to type the sentence and others do not. This could be completely deterministic for the multiverse as a whole: x versions of you will definitely type it, y versions of you will definitely not. I understand the theory, but my example shows how that appears not to be the case, since my experience of intending to do something almost always results in an experience where I do what I intended. I can control the probability range that it will happen through the strength of my motive and the clarity of my sense. However, from your point of view, you don't know which version of you you will experience, so your future is indeterminate / random / probabilistic, not deterministic. So you say. How much do you want to bet that I'm going to sleep in my bed tonight? How about for the rest of my life not including vacations? That's a lot of universe where I sleep under a bush or on the roof or in Jellystone Park. There is obviously at least a small probability that you will decide to sleep under a bush tonight. Only because of how we have defined probability and our assumptions about what it possible. There is nothing to say those definitions and assumptions relate to something real. You would have to admit that under your concept of free will, otherwise in a deterministic single universe you would be compelled to sleep in your bed, which I don't have a problem with but you do. In a deterministic multiverse, you will definitely sleep in your bed in most universes (loosely most if they are infinite in number) and definitely sleep under a bush in a few. You can't be sure in which type of universe you will end up in so the future is indeterminate. I understand the theory, and it would be interesting if we were in a theoretical universe, but ultimately it's absurd. It's Horton Hears A Who on crack. There would be a quintillion universes for every dust mite's turd's journey through the bed sheets. All it accomplishes is to find a way of arguing a way that everything in the universe is real except our own will is real. Somehow our ordinary experience is a magical exception because the idea of our decision making power makes us uncomfortable to explain. It's impossible - logically impossible, impossible even if you know every deterministic detail of the multiverse's future history - for you to know which version will be the real you, since all versions have equal claim to being the real you. This is a quite simple, but counterintuitive idea. No I understand the idea completely, I just think it's an obvious plug for the inconsistencies of QM. Like Dark matter dark energy, superposition, emergence, and entanglement. It's all phlogiston, libido, elan vital, animal magnetism, etc. It's quite nice in theory, but it sodomizes one side of Occam's Razor with the other. It's counter intuitive because it's an absurd way of explaining the universe in terms of nearly infinite nearly nonsensical universes. Every grain of sand on every planet in the cosmos having it's own set of universes customized to fit every pebble collision and sea tousled movement? Seriously? With sense as a primitive you don't need any of that. The universe is one thing with different views of itself. Each view doesn't need to be a creator of literal separate universes. Whether it's true or not is a separate question but it does allow for your future to be truly indeterminate in a deterministic multiverse. The teleportation thought experiments we often talk about here model this in a simpler way. But it does it by neutralizing any significance of one outcome over another. Why do we care about determining anything if we have no power to change it? Craig -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 22, 12:49 pm, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 1:52 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: In addition to approving of one presented option and disapproving of another, Approved for a reason or approved for no reason. right free will allows us to nominate our own option for approval. Nominated for a reason or nominated for no reason. Wrong. I am doing the nominating. I have many reasons, feelings, whims, etc. but it is not necessary for me to choose any of those or not choose any of them. I can create a new course of action which synthesizes some existing elements and projects forward my own novel intention which cannot be reduced to 'for a reason or no reason'. I don't see much of a difference between 'will' and 'free will'. The meaning of will is clear and its existence beyond dispute, I want to do some things and don't want to do other things. But free will means that simultaneously something happened for no reason and that same something did not happened for no reason; this is not even nonsense because there is no sense for it to be opposite to. The stories of Lewis Carroll are nonsense but they are not gibberish, the free will noise is gibberish. You are defining free will as an a priori non-sequitur and then insisting that anyone other than you is defining it that way. When you say I want to do some things and don't want to do other things how is that not free will? You can argue that this feeling of wanting to do things is an illusion as far as it being truly causally efficacious in our body and the world, but that leaves the problem of what would be the point of such a feeling to exist in the universe that is purely deterministic. It's not that free will is ambiguously deterministic and non- determistic, it's that it is orthogonal to determinism. Why? Because our initiative is on the same level as the ground of being. There are laws of physics and we represent some of them personally. We are the Sheriff of voluntary muscle movement in our body and of executive functions of our central nervous system. We interpret and execute the law personally. There are laws we are compelled to observe and preserve, but the way we choose to do that, what we emphasize and let slide, those are actually up to us as individual people and nobody else. They are both colloquial Translation: Shallow. Not thought through. Vague. Ignorant. Not at all. Informal, popular, useful, general rather than technical or academic. terms that don't need to be put under a microscope. Philosophers have been studying these terms for thousands of years without the use of modern tools like microscopes and logic and the scientific method, and that is why they have made precisely ZERO progress in all that time. All your posts could have been written by any philosophically minded well educated man living in 1000BC, but the thing is the human race has learned far more good philosophy since then, but not from philosophers. How is that really working out for us though? http://thismodernworld.com/archives/7012 Maybe it's time to take our hypertrophied objectifying minds and give subjectivity a fresh look, you know, without the chip on our shoulder. Craig -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On Sun, May 20, 2012 PM Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com wrote: Free means it is not imposed onto you. It is free because the choice was made by you. I have no problem with that and I have no problem with the word will; its meaning is clear, people want to do some things and they don't want to do other things. On the other hand not only is it not clear if human beings have this thing called free will it's not even clear what the hell the term is supposed to mean. John K Clark -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 21, 10:47 am, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 20, 2012 PM Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com wrote: Free means it is not imposed onto you. It is free because the choice was made by you. I have no problem with that and I have no problem with the word will; its meaning is clear, people want to do some things and they don't want to do other things. On the other hand not only is it not clear if human beings have this thing called free will it's not even clear what the hell the term is supposed to mean. In addition to approving of one presented option and disapproving of another, free will allows us to nominate our own option for approval. I don't see much of a difference between 'will' and 'free will'. They are both colloquial terms that don't need to be put under a microscope. Free will is used in philosophy and implies that one's will provides a significant degree of influence of in shaping your destiny or circumstances, as opposed to being put upon by circumstance to determine your every thought, feeling, and action. It emphasizes the liberating potential of voluntary personal effort. Craig -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On Sun, May 20, 2012 at 4:00 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: In a branching multiverse where all possibilities happen at a decision point, some versions of you decide to type the sentence and others do not. This could be completely deterministic for the multiverse as a whole: x versions of you will definitely type it, y versions of you will definitely not. I understand the theory, but my example shows how that appears not to be the case, since my experience of intending to do something almost always results in an experience where I do what I intended. I can control the probability range that it will happen through the strength of my motive and the clarity of my sense. However, from your point of view, you don't know which version of you you will experience, so your future is indeterminate / random / probabilistic, not deterministic. So you say. How much do you want to bet that I'm going to sleep in my bed tonight? How about for the rest of my life not including vacations? That's a lot of universe where I sleep under a bush or on the roof or in Jellystone Park. There is obviously at least a small probability that you will decide to sleep under a bush tonight. You would have to admit that under your concept of free will, otherwise in a deterministic single universe you would be compelled to sleep in your bed, which I don't have a problem with but you do. In a deterministic multiverse, you will definitely sleep in your bed in most universes (loosely most if they are infinite in number) and definitely sleep under a bush in a few. You can't be sure in which type of universe you will end up in so the future is indeterminate. It's impossible - logically impossible, impossible even if you know every deterministic detail of the multiverse's future history - for you to know which version will be the real you, since all versions have equal claim to being the real you. This is a quite simple, but counterintuitive idea. No I understand the idea completely, I just think it's an obvious plug for the inconsistencies of QM. Like Dark matter dark energy, superposition, emergence, and entanglement. It's all phlogiston, libido, elan vital, animal magnetism, etc. It's quite nice in theory, but it sodomizes one side of Occam's Razor with the other. It's counter intuitive because it's an absurd way of explaining the universe in terms of nearly infinite nearly nonsensical universes. Every grain of sand on every planet in the cosmos having it's own set of universes customized to fit every pebble collision and sea tousled movement? Seriously? With sense as a primitive you don't need any of that. The universe is one thing with different views of itself. Each view doesn't need to be a creator of literal separate universes. Whether it's true or not is a separate question but it does allow for your future to be truly indeterminate in a deterministic multiverse. The teleportation thought experiments we often talk about here model this in a simpler way. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On 19 May 2012, at 19:46, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 18, 2:56 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 17 May 2012, at 23:02, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 17, 2:04 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Sense and matter is what I search an explanation for. You start at the finishing line. That's why you are looking at it upside down. There isn't an explanation for explanation. It is both the start and finish line. The whole AI, and comp coginitive science search, at the least, explanation for explanation, and a part of it is rather convincing imo. Here you beg the question by extending a lot your don't ask philosophy, I think. I'm not saying don't ask at all - by all means, ask away...but what is ask made of in the first place? It makes sense to me that comp explanations should make almost perfect sense. They make as much sense of the universe as you can make without factoring in sense itself. Once you factor in actual presentation of concrete experience, you should see that there can be nothing that it can logically supervene upon. In order for it to supervene on arithmetic truth, you would have to show actual presentation through arithmetic alone without any matter or energy at all to ground it in a timespace experience within the comsos. Arithmetic has no way to get to timespace without inventing it for no arithmetic purpose. Arithmetic can't justify sense, it assumes sense behind numbers and from the start and begs the question of AI by extending the it can't be that simple philosophy. That just saying that comp is false, without argument. BBp means that the same universal machine now utters Bp. For any arithmetic (or equivalent) proposition, Bp BBp, means that if that machine utters p, it will soon or later utters Bp. So if I utter 'Toast is square', that means that eventually I will utter 'I utter Toast is square' and then 'I utter I utter I utter I utter Toast is squalre'? In principle, except that all universal machine get bored and stop for contingent reason. But to do the math, some simplification are in order. If I'm a UM though, I don't seem to be doing that. I don't seem to be recapitulating the recapitulation of everything I've ever done continuously. You took my words too much literally. B is really believable, not believed. So I am continuously making my beliefs that my beliefs that my beliefs are believable? No. Just that if p is believable, then p is believable is believable. And so one. I work in platonia with ideal machines. And that is a theorem of arithmetic, making it true independently of you and me. I never argue that sense is dependent on human consciousness at all. Sense is universal and literally older than time itself. I have no clue what is that sense and how it related to the use of the word sense. Sense should be self defining, but to be technical I'll say that it is detection, participation, and organizing relations between anything and everything. That's OK. But why believe a priori that machines can't do that. Because machines aren't detecting, participating, and organizing their own relations, they are driven only by agendas external to the assembly as a whole, which ride on top of the natural low level agendas of the groups of molecules, their relation to other objects, the planet, sun, etc. It's the symbol grounding problem. Metal boxes don't feel animal joy and suffering. They may feel electromotive enthusiasm or tactile-acoustic collision, etc, but they have no history as biological organisms that have proven their desire to survive. Yet they survive, and participate with in the multiplication. You just feel superior, and you make unfair comparison. You could have mocked the bacteries, which eventually made us. You confuse arithmetic and the human's apprehension of arithmetic. Not at all. You are assuming that arithmetic is conceivable outside of some kind of sense faculty That would not make ... sense. You need a conceptor to conceive. But you don't need one to make a proposition true or false. You need a conceptor to even make a proposition in the first place. Sure, but the truth of the proposition does not depend on the existence of the sentence possibly used to express that proposition later. The proposition the Moon is a satellite of Earth was arguably true before humans assert propositions. I would argue that proposition is true if and only if there is some awareness of Moonness, Earthness, and a relation between them as well. Yes, it is your panpsychisme. It makes both matter and mind more mysterious, and even if true, does not really contradict comp and its consequence, it needs only making the substitution level very low, and look at the points of view. If there was nothing outside of the Moon and Earth, the Earths universe would consist of only the feeling of being the Earth and detecting the Moon. It could not
Re: Free will in MWI
On Sat, May 19, 2012 at 2:31 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: All free will means is any change made because you wanted to. That would be fine except I know that is NOT all you believe free will means because I know you would not be happy about a calculator having free will, but when the keys 2 + 3 and = are depressed in that sequence the calculator wants to display a 5. No!, I can hear you scream, that's different! Well if it's different then obviously that's not all free will means, there is also a very substantial gibberish component to it. You decide what reasons you care about The calculator decides what LED number to light up. My decisions aren't events that happen unless I decide to make them happen. Very deep. And a calculator can't calculate unless it's calculations happen. Can a cuckoo clock decide to nail the door of the clock shut? No. How can you tell the difference between something random and something caused by an agent you have no understanding of? You can't. Spring is not summer. Why not? I do not consider that point worth debating. I have never made any choice for only one reason. So a large number of deterministic factors caused you to do what you did, or perhaps it was random and no factors at all caused you to do what you did; there is no third way. If you won't respect free will I respect it just as much as I respect a burp. What you think liberty is if not free will? The ability to do what you want to do. As I said before I have no problem with the word will it's free will that is gibberish. John K Clark -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 20, 1:49 pm, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, May 19, 2012 at 2:31 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: All free will means is any change made because you wanted to. That would be fine except I know that is NOT all you believe free will means because I know you would not be happy about a calculator having free will, but when the keys 2 + 3 and = are depressed in that sequence the calculator wants to display a 5. Would you be happy about saying that a trash can lid that says THANK YOU means that the trash can wants to thank you? No!, I can hear you scream, that's different! Well if it's different then obviously that's not all free will means, there is also a very substantial gibberish component to it. It's different because you smuggled the word 'wants' into your example and that is a begging the question fallacy. Wants is free will. If the calculator wants something then it has free will. If we knew that the calculator wanted something then we wouldn't be having this conversation. I know that the calculator does not want to show '5'. It doesn't know what that ASCII-like shape is. Actually that's the key to this whole exchange. Your claims of not understanding free will are exactly why the calculator doesn't have free will, only it's not pretending. It really doesn't know the meaning of the words. You decide what reasons you care about The calculator decides what LED number to light up. No, it decides nothing. It has no choice. You decide what LEDs to make it light up and you decide that stands for the number you expect. The calculation is correct, but only because there are electromagnetic regularities in the solid state crystals that we exploit. Those electronic conditions are symptoms of the only real wants in the thing - holding and releasing synchronized feelings and actions amongst semiconducting molecules. My decisions aren't events that happen unless I decide to make them happen. Very deep. And a calculator can't calculate unless it's calculations happen. Right, but it's calculations aren't decisions at all. It can't decide that 2 + 3 = 17. Can a cuckoo clock decide to nail the door of the clock shut? No. Right. How can you tell the difference between something random and something caused by an agent you have no understanding of? You can't. That's what I'm saying. Spring is not summer. Why not? I do not consider that point worth debating. You would if you had a position worth defending. I have never made any choice for only one reason. So a large number of deterministic factors caused you to do what you did, or perhaps it was random and no factors at all caused you to do what you did; there is no third way. Of course there is a third, orthogonal way. Intention. If you won't respect free will I respect it just as much as I respect a burp. No, that's false. You don't claim to not know what the word burp means. What you think liberty is if not free will? The ability to do what you want to do. As I said before I have no problem with the word will it's free will that is gibberish. All will is free to some extent. What would it mean not to have will otherwise? If someone hypnotizes you and turns you into their slave, would you not have lost your freedom to express will? Craig -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 18, 2:56 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 17 May 2012, at 23:02, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 17, 2:04 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Sense and matter is what I search an explanation for. You start at the finishing line. That's why you are looking at it upside down. There isn't an explanation for explanation. It is both the start and finish line. The whole AI, and comp coginitive science search, at the least, explanation for explanation, and a part of it is rather convincing imo. Here you beg the question by extending a lot your don't ask philosophy, I think. I'm not saying don't ask at all - by all means, ask away...but what is ask made of in the first place? It makes sense to me that comp explanations should make almost perfect sense. They make as much sense of the universe as you can make without factoring in sense itself. Once you factor in actual presentation of concrete experience, you should see that there can be nothing that it can logically supervene upon. In order for it to supervene on arithmetic truth, you would have to show actual presentation through arithmetic alone without any matter or energy at all to ground it in a timespace experience within the comsos. Arithmetic has no way to get to timespace without inventing it for no arithmetic purpose. Arithmetic can't justify sense, it assumes sense behind numbers and from the start and begs the question of AI by extending the it can't be that simple philosophy. BBp means that the same universal machine now utters Bp. For any arithmetic (or equivalent) proposition, Bp BBp, means that if that machine utters p, it will soon or later utters Bp. So if I utter 'Toast is square', that means that eventually I will utter 'I utter Toast is square' and then 'I utter I utter I utter I utter Toast is squalre'? In principle, except that all universal machine get bored and stop for contingent reason. But to do the math, some simplification are in order. If I'm a UM though, I don't seem to be doing that. I don't seem to be recapitulating the recapitulation of everything I've ever done continuously. You took my words too much literally. B is really believable, not believed. So I am continuously making my beliefs that my beliefs that my beliefs are believable? And that is a theorem of arithmetic, making it true independently of you and me. I never argue that sense is dependent on human consciousness at all. Sense is universal and literally older than time itself. I have no clue what is that sense and how it related to the use of the word sense. Sense should be self defining, but to be technical I'll say that it is detection, participation, and organizing relations between anything and everything. That's OK. But why believe a priori that machines can't do that. Because machines aren't detecting, participating, and organizing their own relations, they are driven only by agendas external to the assembly as a whole, which ride on top of the natural low level agendas of the groups of molecules, their relation to other objects, the planet, sun, etc. It's the symbol grounding problem. Metal boxes don't feel animal joy and suffering. They may feel electromotive enthusiasm or tactile-acoustic collision, etc, but they have no history as biological organisms that have proven their desire to survive. You confuse arithmetic and the human's apprehension of arithmetic. Not at all. You are assuming that arithmetic is conceivable outside of some kind of sense faculty That would not make ... sense. You need a conceptor to conceive. But you don't need one to make a proposition true or false. You need a conceptor to even make a proposition in the first place. Sure, but the truth of the proposition does not depend on the existence of the sentence possibly used to express that proposition later. The proposition the Moon is a satellite of Earth was arguably true before humans assert propositions. I would argue that proposition is true if and only if there is some awareness of Moonness, Earthness, and a relation between them as well. If there was nothing outside of the Moon and Earth, the Earths universe would consist of only the feeling of being the Earth and detecting the Moon. It could not see itself as a planet unless it figured it out through the experience of the revolving rotating moon (forget that there would be no light without the sun) and a leap of faith rooted in metaphor that perhaps what is inside is like what is outside. That would forever be a mystery however unless there is a third similar object, so that either of the other two can confidently infer that they are all similar objects in similar relation. You would need that third subject to make the proposition the Moon is a satellite of Earth true. True or false is a second order logic on top of that. The idea that you don't need a subject to make a proposition
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 18, 8:02 pm, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, May 19, 2012 at 1:03 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: You haven't understood a basic point, which is important independently of the current discussion. This point is that if we live in a perfectly deterministic multiverse, our subjective experience will be probabilistic. This is because it is impossible for a being embedded in the multiverse to know in which branch he will end up. The impossibility is logical, not merely empirical. If I decide to type this sentence, the probability of both of us ending up in a branch of the multiverse in which this sentence appears before you on your screen is close to 100%. How does that work exactly? Since I know that it will appear in both of our universes, not merely logically or empirically but intuitively and unquestionably, does that mean that MWI is cannot be viable? In a branching multiverse where all possibilities happen at a decision point, some versions of you decide to type the sentence and others do not. This could be completely deterministic for the multiverse as a whole: x versions of you will definitely type it, y versions of you will definitely not. I understand the theory, but my example shows how that appears not to be the case, since my experience of intending to do something almost always results in an experience where I do what I intended. I can control the probability range that it will happen through the strength of my motive and the clarity of my sense. However, from your point of view, you don't know which version of you you will experience, so your future is indeterminate / random / probabilistic, not deterministic. So you say. How much do you want to bet that I'm going to sleep in my bed tonight? How about for the rest of my life not including vacations? That's a lot of universe where I sleep under a bush or on the roof or in Jellystone Park. It's impossible - logically impossible, impossible even if you know every deterministic detail of the multiverse's future history - for you to know which version will be the real you, since all versions have equal claim to being the real you. This is a quite simple, but counterintuitive idea. No I understand the idea completely, I just think it's an obvious plug for the inconsistencies of QM. Like Dark matter dark energy, superposition, emergence, and entanglement. It's all phlogiston, libido, elan vital, animal magnetism, etc. It's quite nice in theory, but it sodomizes one side of Occam's Razor with the other. It's counter intuitive because it's an absurd way of explaining the universe in terms of nearly infinite nearly nonsensical universes. Every grain of sand on every planet in the cosmos having it's own set of universes customized to fit every pebble collision and sea tousled movement? Seriously? With sense as a primitive you don't need any of that. The universe is one thing with different views of itself. Each view doesn't need to be a creator of literal separate universes. Craig -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 18, 4:12 pm, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 7:34 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: They [computers] won't EVER discover a printer that is sitting right next to them without having drivers loaded and configured And you won't EVER discover a printer sitting right next to you if you had no eyes or hands. Sure I would. I could listen for it running. I could yell out, 'hey can someone turn on the printer' or fumble around with my foot or a cane and turn it on with my teeth. Did the reason change your internal programming by itself while you passively watched or did you voluntarily decide to commit to it? Voluntarily just means a change made because I wanted to, and that want came about for a reason or it did not come about for a reason and the free will noise is not needed to understand any of this. All free will means is any change made because you wanted to. It doesn't matter why you made the change, because the decision ultimately is yours. You decide what reasons you care about to some degree (any degree greater than 'not at all ever' will do to establish some level of free will). How do you know the car isn't controlling your foot instead? As long as me and my car agree where my foot should be it wouldn't matter, and so far I haven't been in any major car wrecks so we seem to agree on where my foot should be. That's a philosophically valid way to think about it but it's complete crap. It's what you tell someone if you want to spend a few days in the psych ward. If I was into multisense unrealism, I would agree, yes, that's a cool way of thinking about it, but if I had to guess at how the universe actually works or be run over by a riding mower, I would go with the obvious reality that we are driving the car and the car is going where we are driving it, not the other way around. According to your argument, there would be no way to tell the difference I believe I just said that, and if there is no way to tell the difference then there is no reason to care. But if you actually can't tell the difference in reality, you are having a psychotic episode. You are the one who keeps injecting random into this. I am just injecting the very obvious and noncontroversial fact that events happen for a reason or they do not. My decisions aren't events that happen unless I decide to make them happen. I don't need random at all to understand free will. Fine, then you think we always do things for a reason, a cuckoo clock does too. Can a cuckoo clock decide to nail the door of the clock shut? Random is nothing but a quality of pattern recognition. If we can't find a pattern, we call it random. You're a little behind the times, a century ago most thought that was probably true and that everything had a cause we just don't know it, but today most think it's probably false and even a century ago it was known that there is no law of logic that demands all events have associated causes. However this is all irrelevant, true or false it will not help you explain what the hell the ASCII string free will is supposed to mean. How can you tell the difference between something random and something caused by an agent you have no understanding of? Which is it? Is spring summer or is spring not summer? Spring is not summer. Why not? Spring and summer can be two different ways of referring to the warmer time of year. Light blue could be named Cool green instead. Words are made up. In the tropics they undoubtedly have the same word for spring and summer. Where I live there is no meaningful difference between the seasons anymore. It can be winter in the afternoon and summer at night. It happens all the time. Spring and summer are just different degrees of the same thing Yes they are *different* so spring is not summer. Do I really have to explain this? I was taught this in preschool. Sesame Street had a song about it: One of these things is not like the others, One of these things just doesn't belong, Can you tell which thing is not like the others By the time I finish my song? Did you guess which thing was not like the others? Did you guess which thing just doesn't belong? If you guessed this one is not like the others, Then you're absolutely...right! Yes but I outgrew Sesame Street and narrow literalism. I understand that the map is not the territory. I understand semiotics and psychology. I have explained that the idea of Spring not being summer is a relative interpretation. Where I live January is considered winter. In Australia January isn't winter. There are always exceptions to every arbitrary linguistic convention. Language is constantly evolving and redefining itself. there are many different types of deterministic processes. And I choose among them and/or create my own new processes dynamically. You keep throwing
Re: Free will in MWI
On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 10:34 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: I don't think you understand what I understand. Of course the limitation of the 1p view excludes information relative to a 3p view, but the reverse is true as well. Indeterminism emerges as a third person phenomenon in that subjective privacy cannot be experienced through it. Determinism emerges as both a first and third person phenomenon in the form of sense. Motive or will (or 'energy' in third person') emerges as an orthogonal category relative to determinism; self-determination, which is the impulse and capacity to make the indetermined determined. 'I am become will, the collapser of wave functions.' You haven't understood a basic point, which is important independently of the current discussion. This point is that if we live in a perfectly deterministic multiverse, our subjective experience will be probabilistic. This is because it is impossible for a being embedded in the multiverse to know in which branch he will end up. The impossibility is logical, not merely empirical. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 18, 10:44 am, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 10:34 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: I don't think you understand what I understand. Of course the limitation of the 1p view excludes information relative to a 3p view, but the reverse is true as well. Indeterminism emerges as a third person phenomenon in that subjective privacy cannot be experienced through it. Determinism emerges as both a first and third person phenomenon in the form of sense. Motive or will (or 'energy' in third person') emerges as an orthogonal category relative to determinism; self-determination, which is the impulse and capacity to make the indetermined determined. 'I am become will, the collapser of wave functions.' You haven't understood a basic point, which is important independently of the current discussion. This point is that if we live in a perfectly deterministic multiverse, our subjective experience will be probabilistic. This is because it is impossible for a being embedded in the multiverse to know in which branch he will end up. The impossibility is logical, not merely empirical. If I decide to type this sentence, the probability of both of us ending up in a branch of the multiverse in which this sentence appears before you on your screen is close to 100%. How does that work exactly? Since I know that it will appear in both of our universes, not merely logically or empirically but intuitively and unquestionably, does that mean that MWI is cannot be viable? Craig -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 7:34 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: They [computers] won't EVER discover a printer that is sitting right next to them without having drivers loaded and configured And you won't EVER discover a printer sitting right next to you if you had no eyes or hands. Did the reason change your internal programming by itself while you passively watched or did you voluntarily decide to commit to it? Voluntarily just means a change made because I wanted to, and that want came about for a reason or it did not come about for a reason and the free will noise is not needed to understand any of this. How do you know the car isn't controlling your foot instead? As long as me and my car agree where my foot should be it wouldn't matter, and so far I haven't been in any major car wrecks so we seem to agree on where my foot should be. According to your argument, there would be no way to tell the difference I believe I just said that, and if there is no way to tell the difference then there is no reason to care. You are the one who keeps injecting random into this. I am just injecting the very obvious and noncontroversial fact that events happen for a reason or they do not. I don't need random at all to understand free will. Fine, then you think we always do things for a reason, a cuckoo clock does too. Random is nothing but a quality of pattern recognition. If we can't find a pattern, we call it random. You're a little behind the times, a century ago most thought that was probably true and that everything had a cause we just don't know it, but today most think it's probably false and even a century ago it was known that there is no law of logic that demands all events have associated causes. However this is all irrelevant, true or false it will not help you explain what the hell the ASCII string free will is supposed to mean. Which is it? Is spring summer or is spring not summer? Spring is not summer. Spring and summer are just different degrees of the same thing Yes they are *different* so spring is not summer. Do I really have to explain this? I was taught this in preschool. Sesame Street had a song about it: One of these things is not like the others, One of these things just doesn't belong, Can you tell which thing is not like the others By the time I finish my song? Did you guess which thing was not like the others? Did you guess which thing just doesn't belong? If you guessed this one is not like the others, Then you're absolutely...right! there are many different types of deterministic processes. And I choose among them and/or create my own new processes dynamically. You keep throwing around that word choice as if its a talisman against uncomfortable logic, but the fact remains that every single choice you have ever made in your life was made for a reason or it was not made for a reason; and no amount of mixing and matching determinism and randomness will get you where you want to go with the free will noise, not even if you knew where you wanted it to go with it and of course you do not. All you know is you don't like where logic leads you on the free will path, into the mystical land of gibberish. There is a difference between making a determination and being determined to passively watch a determination I don't know what passively determined means. Free will = caused by me (intentionally). You can call free will deterministic You say it's caused so what the hell else except deterministic am I supposed to call it? What does that word mean if it includes all possibilities including libertarian free will? That word salad has a question mark at the end so I guess its a question but of exactly what I can not say. All I know is that I've been a libertarian all my life and all my life I've known that people who like to make the free will noise have no idea what it means. John K Clark -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On Sat, May 19, 2012 at 1:03 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: You haven't understood a basic point, which is important independently of the current discussion. This point is that if we live in a perfectly deterministic multiverse, our subjective experience will be probabilistic. This is because it is impossible for a being embedded in the multiverse to know in which branch he will end up. The impossibility is logical, not merely empirical. If I decide to type this sentence, the probability of both of us ending up in a branch of the multiverse in which this sentence appears before you on your screen is close to 100%. How does that work exactly? Since I know that it will appear in both of our universes, not merely logically or empirically but intuitively and unquestionably, does that mean that MWI is cannot be viable? In a branching multiverse where all possibilities happen at a decision point, some versions of you decide to type the sentence and others do not. This could be completely deterministic for the multiverse as a whole: x versions of you will definitely type it, y versions of you will definitely not. However, from your point of view, you don't know which version of you you will experience, so your future is indeterminate / random / probabilistic, not deterministic. It's impossible - logically impossible, impossible even if you know every deterministic detail of the multiverse's future history - for you to know which version will be the real you, since all versions have equal claim to being the real you. This is a quite simple, but counterintuitive idea. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On 16 May 2012, at 17:37, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 16, 10:41 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 15 May 2012, at 19:44, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 15, 1:03 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: But a deterministic world, if rich enough to add and multiply, and thus to contain universal internal observers, leads already to indeterminist first person realities (even without comp, although it is simpler to use comp to justify this). If a wave washes one pile of sand onto another, thereby 'adding' them together, why does that generate universal internal observers? Adding is not enough. You need multiplication, and iteration. Then universal digital creatures appear, by logical consequences, and, as always, reflect themselves and all universal creatures, digital, and non digital, which leads them to harder and harder problems and questions. Even if that's true, from where do they appear? To say they appear is to admit that they are not themselves contained within addition or multiplication. They are. Anything Turing emulable appears, and reappears in arithmetic, related to bigger and bigger natural numbers. The appearance is contingent though, upon something being able to recognize the pattern which is appearing to them. That's correct. It is contingent of the universal number, and the universal numbers making the first one more relatively probable. But all that exist in arithmetic. That pattern recognition is not automatically guaranteed by any arithmetic logic. In your non-comp theory. We need a physical machine that remembers that it can remember, That's Bp - BBp. Universal machine are like that. and can experience that memory as an event. It needs to know what kinds of strings of remembered digits constitute a meaningful pattern, or that there could even be such a thing as a pattern. To say that patterns appear and reappear in arithmetic takes the appearance of pattern itself for granted, then usurps the primacy of the sense experience which provides it. Not really, for it appears and reappears only in the mind of universal numbers. It makes sense for them, and indeed they will be astonished that apparent material can lead to that sense. But although locally true, this is globally wrong. Sense is necessarily a first person notion, and relies on the abstract but real configuration involving infinities of arithmetical relations. To say they are creatures implies a creation. Why not. You could say that they are created by the addition and multiplication laws. You need only to bet that 1+1=2 and alike does not depend on us. Because there's no mathematical logic to how or why that creation could occur. But there is. If we posit a universe of arithmetic realism, how can we accept that it falls off a cliff when it comes to the arithmetic of it's own origins? What makes 1+1=2? Sense. Truth. Why do you want someone to assess the truth for something being true. That is anthropomorphic. Th greek get well that point, and originate the whole scientific enterprise from there, as in the conclusion of this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69F7GhASOdM If not, it is the whole idea of a reality which makes no more sense, and we get solipsist or anthropomorphic. Not primitive sense either, but high order cognitive abstraction. There is no '1' or '2' literally, they are ideas about our common sense - what we have in common with everything. Numbers are literally 'figures', symbols which can be applied mentally to represent many things, No. That's number description. Not numbers. and to deploy orderly control of some physical systems - but not everything can be reduced to or controlled by numbers. But that's what number can discover by themselves. Once you are at the treshold of numbers, the complexity of the relations (even just between numbers) get higher than what you can describe with numbers. the numbers already know that, with reasonable account of what is knowledge. What necessary logic turns a nuclear chain reaction (addition and multiplication) into a nursery for problem solving sentience? The same logic making tiny system Turing universal. Usually some small part of classical logic is enough. Why would any kind of universality or logic entail the automatic development of sentience? What is logical about sentience? The illogicality of sentience. From the point of view of numbers, when they look at themselves, they discover, for logical reason, that there is something non logical about them. Then the comp act of faith appears to be the simplest way to restore logic, except for that act of faith and the belief in addition and multiplication. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 17, 12:01 am, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 1:45 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote I don't say that [the free will noise] means you're not deterministic, I would be glad to hear you say that except that according to illogical Weinbergian logic just because something is not not deterministic does not mean its deterministic, so I don't know what the hell you mean. Why is it Weinbergian logic? Have you not noticed that others here who are also trying to tell you what orthogonal means? What might that be about in Clarkian logic? I say that means you can make determinations. If a determination is not made for a reason then its not a determination, it’s a crap-shoot. Determinations are not usually made for A reason, they are made for MANY reasons. It's always a guess to some degree and an informed acquiescence to some degree, and a personal preference to some degree. Sometimes those determinations are influenced more by conditions you perceive as external to yourself, Sometimes a computer's CPU works on data already in it's memory unit, and sometimes it works on newly inputted data. 'Newly inputted' data is still in it's memory unit. The CPU doesn't spontaneously generate new feelings like the human mind does. and sometimes it is you who are influencing external conditions. And sometimes computers output data to external things like printers or video screens or internet connections and sometimes they do not. That's true, but they don't care whether they output or not. It's not driven by their own intention. They won't EVER discover a printer that is sitting right next to them without having drivers loaded and configured to even connect. you can voluntarily choose to reason differently Yes I can change my mind, I've done it before but in the past whenever I changed my internal programming I have always done so for a reason, if I ever find myself changing my mind for no reason then I intend to call 911 because I'm undergoing a serious medical emergency of some sort and a hardware malfunction is going on in my brain. Did the reason change your internal programming by itself while you passively watched or did you voluntarily decide to commit to it? If you are completely deterministic, then how do you know that the car isn't driving you instead of you driving a car? If I determine that the brake needs to be applied I find that my foot depresses the brake peddle and I feel (correctly I think) that I am in control. How do you know the car isn't controlling your foot instead? According to your argument, there would be no way to tell the difference as either description of the event of braking is equally accurate and deterministic. free will is neither fully deterministic nor random, nor fully not deterministic nor random. That makes no sense. You say I have free will so I don't see how randomness can help you clarify what that means because I is something but something does not cause random things to happen, If you talk to a schizophrenic, what they say will seem more random than someone else. Their I is causing things to happen with more randomness. nothing does, so the concept of randomness is no help at all in understanding what the ASCII sequence I have free will means. You are the one who keeps injecting random into this. I don't need random at all to understand free will. Random is nothing but a quality of pattern recognition. If we can't find a pattern, we call it random. Maybe every radioactive decay event in the universe is eventually going to synchronize to spell out God's name in Red, White, and Blue letters on his TV screen, how would we know? Just as Spring is neither fully Summer nor Winter, Large complex things like the weather usually happen for many reasons, but every one of those reasons themselves happened for a reason or they did not happen for a reason. Um, I'm not saying anything about the weather being deterministic or not, I am strictly talking about how things can be arranged orthogonally. I am disproving your claim that everything must be only one thing or another thing. And one thing is beyond dispute to any logical person, spring is summer or spring is not summer. Which is it? Is spring summer or is spring not summer? Isn't spring nothing but the transition from winter to summer? Without that transition to summer could you have spring? Spring and summer are just different degrees of the same thing. If you insist upon arbitrarily reducing the universe to a single dimension of determined vs random, then Then I have understood the lesson taught on day one of logic 101, that X is Y or X is not Y and there is no third alternative. You have understood that all too well, but you have not progressed to logic 102. There are always more than two alternatives and X and Y are symbolic constructs, not concrete realities. you cannot understand
Re: Free will in MWI
2012/5/17 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com On May 17, 12:01 am, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 1:45 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote I don't say that [the free will noise] means you're not deterministic, I would be glad to hear you say that except that according to illogical Weinbergian logic just because something is not not deterministic does not mean its deterministic, so I don't know what the hell you mean. Why is it Weinbergian logic? Have you not noticed that others here who are also trying to tell you what orthogonal means? What might that be about in Clarkian logic? I say that means you can make determinations. If a determination is not made for a reason then its not a determination, it’s a crap-shoot. Determinations are not usually made for A reason, they are made for MANY reasons. It's always a guess to some degree and an informed acquiescence to some degree, and a personal preference to some degree. Sometimes those determinations are influenced more by conditions you perceive as external to yourself, Sometimes a computer's CPU works on data already in it's memory unit, and sometimes it works on newly inputted data. 'Newly inputted' data is still in it's memory unit. The CPU doesn't spontaneously generate new feelings like the human mind does. and sometimes it is you who are influencing external conditions. And sometimes computers output data to external things like printers or video screens or internet connections and sometimes they do not. That's true, but they don't care whether they output or not. It's not driven by their own intention. They won't EVER discover a printer that is sitting right next to them without having drivers loaded and configured to even connect. Your unique argument against a program being able to be conscious (as conscious as a human can be) is to take a non-conscious program and to say see it's not conscious... well yes it is not, that doesn't mean no program can be. Quentin you can voluntarily choose to reason differently Yes I can change my mind, I've done it before but in the past whenever I changed my internal programming I have always done so for a reason, if I ever find myself changing my mind for no reason then I intend to call 911 because I'm undergoing a serious medical emergency of some sort and a hardware malfunction is going on in my brain. Did the reason change your internal programming by itself while you passively watched or did you voluntarily decide to commit to it? If you are completely deterministic, then how do you know that the car isn't driving you instead of you driving a car? If I determine that the brake needs to be applied I find that my foot depresses the brake peddle and I feel (correctly I think) that I am in control. How do you know the car isn't controlling your foot instead? According to your argument, there would be no way to tell the difference as either description of the event of braking is equally accurate and deterministic. free will is neither fully deterministic nor random, nor fully not deterministic nor random. That makes no sense. You say I have free will so I don't see how randomness can help you clarify what that means because I is something but something does not cause random things to happen, If you talk to a schizophrenic, what they say will seem more random than someone else. Their I is causing things to happen with more randomness. nothing does, so the concept of randomness is no help at all in understanding what the ASCII sequence I have free will means. You are the one who keeps injecting random into this. I don't need random at all to understand free will. Random is nothing but a quality of pattern recognition. If we can't find a pattern, we call it random. Maybe every radioactive decay event in the universe is eventually going to synchronize to spell out God's name in Red, White, and Blue letters on his TV screen, how would we know? Just as Spring is neither fully Summer nor Winter, Large complex things like the weather usually happen for many reasons, but every one of those reasons themselves happened for a reason or they did not happen for a reason. Um, I'm not saying anything about the weather being deterministic or not, I am strictly talking about how things can be arranged orthogonally. I am disproving your claim that everything must be only one thing or another thing. And one thing is beyond dispute to any logical person, spring is summer or spring is not summer. Which is it? Is spring summer or is spring not summer? Isn't spring nothing but the transition from winter to summer? Without that transition to summer could you have spring? Spring and summer are just different degrees of the same thing. If you insist upon arbitrarily reducing the universe to a single
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 17, 5:49 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 16 May 2012, at 17:37, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 16, 10:41 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 15 May 2012, at 19:44, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 15, 1:03 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: But a deterministic world, if rich enough to add and multiply, and thus to contain universal internal observers, leads already to indeterminist first person realities (even without comp, although it is simpler to use comp to justify this). If a wave washes one pile of sand onto another, thereby 'adding' them together, why does that generate universal internal observers? Adding is not enough. You need multiplication, and iteration. Then universal digital creatures appear, by logical consequences, and, as always, reflect themselves and all universal creatures, digital, and non digital, which leads them to harder and harder problems and questions. Even if that's true, from where do they appear? To say they appear is to admit that they are not themselves contained within addition or multiplication. They are. Anything Turing emulable appears, and reappears in arithmetic, related to bigger and bigger natural numbers. The appearance is contingent though, upon something being able to recognize the pattern which is appearing to them. That's correct. It is contingent of the universal number, and the universal numbers making the first one more relatively probable. But all that exist in arithmetic. What are the properties of arithmetic contingent on? That pattern recognition is not automatically guaranteed by any arithmetic logic. In your non-comp theory. We need a physical machine that remembers that it can remember, That's Bp - BBp. Universal machine are like that. Those are just letters and symbols. What or who makes them mean something and why? and can experience that memory as an event. It needs to know what kinds of strings of remembered digits constitute a meaningful pattern, or that there could even be such a thing as a pattern. To say that patterns appear and reappear in arithmetic takes the appearance of pattern itself for granted, then usurps the primacy of the sense experience which provides it. Not really, for it appears and reappears only in the mind of universal numbers. It makes sense for them, and indeed they will be astonished that apparent material can lead to that sense. But although locally true, this is globally wrong. Sense is necessarily a first person notion, and relies on the abstract but real configuration involving infinities of arithmetical relations. I don't think sense is a first person notion, it is the very capacity to define first person and third person as separate (opposite) on one level, and united on another. Sense creates the arithmetical relations, but not infinitely. Arithmetical relations are derived a posteriori of sense embodiments. Sense generates the capacities, intentions, symmetries, and rhythms that underlie recursive enumeration, as well as frames the context of all sequence and consequence. It all has to make sense. Not everything has to make numbers. Dizzy doesn't make numbers, but it makes sense. It is a sensation that makes sense to an embodied animal, but not to a computer. To say they are creatures implies a creation. Why not. You could say that they are created by the addition and multiplication laws. You need only to bet that 1+1=2 and alike does not depend on us. Because there's no mathematical logic to how or why that creation could occur. But there is. What is it? If we posit a universe of arithmetic realism, how can we accept that it falls off a cliff when it comes to the arithmetic of it's own origins? What makes 1+1=2? Sense. Truth. Truth requires sense. Not everything that makes sense is true (fiction for example), but everything that is true makes sense. Why do you want someone to assess the truth for something being true. That is anthropomorphic. It's ontologically necessary. What is a truth without it being detectable in some way to something? Th greek get well that point, and originate the whole scientific enterprise from there, as in the conclusion of this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69F7GhASOdM Great video, but now you are the one anthropomorphizing. Just because the released man doesn't create the outside world by seeing it doesn't mean that the outside world can exist without being held together by experienced sense relations on every level. My computer doesn't create the internet, but that doesn't mean that the internet isn't created on computers. If not, it is the whole idea of a reality which makes no more sense, and we get solipsist or anthropomorphic. That's where sense comes in. Sense divides the totality into solipsistic/anthropomorphic and objective/mechanemorphic on one level, but bleeds through
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 17, 7:57 am, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com wrote: That's true, but they don't care whether they output or not. It's not driven by their own intention. They won't EVER discover a printer that is sitting right next to them without having drivers loaded and configured to even connect. Your unique argument against a program being able to be conscious (as conscious as a human can be) is to take a non-conscious program and to say see it's not conscious... well yes it is not, that doesn't mean no program can be. Yes, in a sense that's true, but since the only example of something conscious we have is ourselves, the alternative is to take a non- conscious program and say there's no reason that some future version of it can't be just like me eventually. The former makes more sense to me. It's not only that logic that makes me suspect the former is the case though. There seems to be a specific, glaring lack of sentience in all machines that does not reduce in the slightest even as machines scale up exponentially in complexity. No byte has ever done anything by itself, and I don't see why it ever would. I only bring up the shortcomings of machines and programs because that's the only common sense examples I can really use, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. I am trying to use that common sense as a lever to open you up the deeper understanding that I have about how intention arises from within matter and cannot be transplanted from the outside as with a computer. It's not a matter of Luddite neophobia at all, believe me I am a transhumanist to the core, I just think we are not going to get there without water, sugar, protein, lipids, etc. Craig -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On 17 May 2012, at 14:21, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 17, 5:49 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 16 May 2012, at 17:37, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 16, 10:41 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 15 May 2012, at 19:44, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 15, 1:03 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: But a deterministic world, if rich enough to add and multiply, and thus to contain universal internal observers, leads already to indeterminist first person realities (even without comp, although it is simpler to use comp to justify this). If a wave washes one pile of sand onto another, thereby 'adding' them together, why does that generate universal internal observers? Adding is not enough. You need multiplication, and iteration. Then universal digital creatures appear, by logical consequences, and, as always, reflect themselves and all universal creatures, digital, and non digital, which leads them to harder and harder problems and questions. Even if that's true, from where do they appear? To say they appear is to admit that they are not themselves contained within addition or multiplication. They are. Anything Turing emulable appears, and reappears in arithmetic, related to bigger and bigger natural numbers. The appearance is contingent though, upon something being able to recognize the pattern which is appearing to them. That's correct. It is contingent of the universal number, and the universal numbers making the first one more relatively probable. But all that exist in arithmetic. What are the properties of arithmetic contingent on? The idea is that such properties are not contingent. You could take any universal system, instead of arithmetic. From the computability perspective, they are equivalent. That pattern recognition is not automatically guaranteed by any arithmetic logic. In your non-comp theory. We need a physical machine that remembers that it can remember, That's Bp - BBp. Universal machine are like that. Those are just letters and symbols. What or who makes them mean something and why? Bp means that some universal machine utters p. Absolutely. Independently of you and me. BBp means that the same universal machine now utters Bp. For any arithmetic (or equivalent) proposition, Bp BBp, means that if that machine utters p, it will soon or later utters Bp. And that is a theorem of arithmetic, making it true independently of you and me. and can experience that memory as an event. It needs to know what kinds of strings of remembered digits constitute a meaningful pattern, or that there could even be such a thing as a pattern. To say that patterns appear and reappear in arithmetic takes the appearance of pattern itself for granted, then usurps the primacy of the sense experience which provides it. Not really, for it appears and reappears only in the mind of universal numbers. It makes sense for them, and indeed they will be astonished that apparent material can lead to that sense. But although locally true, this is globally wrong. Sense is necessarily a first person notion, and relies on the abstract but real configuration involving infinities of arithmetical relations. I don't think sense is a first person notion, it is the very capacity to define first person and third person as separate (opposite) on one level, and united on another. Sense creates the arithmetical relations, but not infinitely. Arithmetical relations are derived a posteriori of sense embodiments. You confuse arithmetic and the human's apprehension of arithmetic. Sense generates the capacities, intentions, symmetries, and rhythms that underlie recursive enumeration, as well as frames the context of all sequence and consequence. It all has to make sense. We need only the idea that a reality can exists beyond human sensing. This is what I assume by making explicit the arithmetical realism, and that can be shown enough when we assume that we work locally as machine, at some description level. As I already told you, to make this false, you need to build an explicit non computable and non Turing recoverable function having a genuine role for the mind. This unfortunately only makes more complex both mind and matter, making your non-comp hypothesis looking like a construct for making impossible to reason in that field. Not everything has to make numbers. Dizzy doesn't make numbers, but it makes sense. But numbers does not make only numbers. They make and develop sense for many things far more complex than numbers, that is the point. Arithmetical truth itself is far beyond of numbers, yet numbers can relatively develop some intuition about those kind of things. You just seems stuck in a reductionist conception of numbers and machines. We know such conception are wrong. It is a sensation that makes sense to an embodied animal, but not to a computer. How could we know that?
Re: Free will in MWI
On 5/17/2012 9:50 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 17 May 2012, at 14:21, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 17, 5:49 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 16 May 2012, at 17:37, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 16, 10:41 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 15 May 2012, at 19:44, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 15, 1:03 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: But a deterministic world, if rich enough to add and multiply, and thus to contain universal internal observers, leads already to indeterminist first person realities (even without comp, although it is simpler to use comp to justify this). If a wave washes one pile of sand onto another, thereby 'adding' them together, why does that generate universal internal observers? Adding is not enough. You need multiplication, and iteration. Then universal digital creatures appear, by logical consequences, and, as always, reflect themselves and all universal creatures, digital, and non digital, which leads them to harder and harder problems and questions. Even if that's true, from where do they appear? To say they appear is to admit that they are not themselves contained within addition or multiplication. They are. Anything Turing emulable appears, and reappears in arithmetic, related to bigger and bigger natural numbers. The appearance is contingent though, upon something being able to recognize the pattern which is appearing to them. That's correct. It is contingent of the universal number, and the universal numbers making the first one more relatively probable. But all that exist in arithmetic. What are the properties of arithmetic contingent on? The idea is that such properties are not contingent. You could take any universal system, instead of arithmetic. From the computability perspective, they are equivalent. Hi Bruno, I would like to add comments in defense of what I think Craig is trying to communicate. Universality is relative independence to a particular means of expression. It is not Independence in the sense of mutual isolation or complete absence of relations. That pattern recognition is not automatically guaranteed by any arithmetic logic. In your non-comp theory. We need a physical machine that remembers that it can remember, That's Bp - BBp. Universal machine are like that. Those are just letters and symbols. What or who makes them mean something and why? Bp means that some universal machine utters p. Absolutely. Independently of you and me. BBp means that the same universal machine now utters Bp. For any arithmetic (or equivalent) proposition, Bp BBp, means that if that machine utters p, it will soon or later utters Bp. And that is a theorem of arithmetic, making it true independently of you and me. And these statements have a definite meaning only because there is a relatively unambiguous structure of relations within our collective minds that gives meaning to them. Apart from that structure they are meaningless. Statements, like objects, cannot have inherent and definite properties other than just some spectrum of possible properties. Why? Because properties are the result of actual observations/interactions by physical systems. Absent the actual means to count the quantity of fruit in a basket, it is incoherent to say that a certain quantity of fruit in the basket. We have goten away with talking in ambiguous terms for far too long. and can experience that memory as an event. It needs to know what kinds of strings of remembered digits constitute a meaningful pattern, or that there could even be such a thing as a pattern. To say that patterns appear and reappear in arithmetic takes the appearance of pattern itself for granted, then usurps the primacy of the sense experience which provides it. Not really, for it appears and reappears only in the mind of universal numbers. It makes sense for them, and indeed they will be astonished that apparent material can lead to that sense. But although locally true, this is globally wrong. Sense is necessarily a first person notion, and relies on the abstract but real configuration involving infinities of arithmetical relations. I don't think sense is a first person notion, it is the very capacity to define first person and third person as separate (opposite) on one level, and united on another. Sense creates the arithmetical relations, but not infinitely. Arithmetical relations are derived a posteriori of sense embodiments. You confuse arithmetic and the human's apprehension of arithmetic. No, you do. You are assuming that differences exist in the absence of the means to define differences. Sense generates the capacities, intentions, symmetries, and rhythms that underlie recursive enumeration, as well as frames the context of all sequence and consequence. It all has to make sense. We need only the idea that a reality can exists beyond human sensing. This is what I assume
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 17, 9:50 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 17 May 2012, at 14:21, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 17, 5:49 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 16 May 2012, at 17:37, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 16, 10:41 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 15 May 2012, at 19:44, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 15, 1:03 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: But a deterministic world, if rich enough to add and multiply, and thus to contain universal internal observers, leads already to indeterminist first person realities (even without comp, although it is simpler to use comp to justify this). If a wave washes one pile of sand onto another, thereby 'adding' them together, why does that generate universal internal observers? Adding is not enough. You need multiplication, and iteration. Then universal digital creatures appear, by logical consequences, and, as always, reflect themselves and all universal creatures, digital, and non digital, which leads them to harder and harder problems and questions. Even if that's true, from where do they appear? To say they appear is to admit that they are not themselves contained within addition or multiplication. They are. Anything Turing emulable appears, and reappears in arithmetic, related to bigger and bigger natural numbers. The appearance is contingent though, upon something being able to recognize the pattern which is appearing to them. That's correct. It is contingent of the universal number, and the universal numbers making the first one more relatively probable. But all that exist in arithmetic. What are the properties of arithmetic contingent on? The idea is that such properties are not contingent. That's still an idea though, ie sense. Sense doesn't need that property since it can't be explained any other way. I can explain arithmetic sense as a category of sense, but I can't explain sense as a category of arithmetic unless you just tack it on and say it must be part of the package inherently. You could take any universal system, instead of arithmetic. From the computability perspective, they are equivalent. You can run over anything with a large enough steam roller and it will be flat. If you don't use a computability perspective, they aren't equivalent. That pattern recognition is not automatically guaranteed by any arithmetic logic. In your non-comp theory. We need a physical machine that remembers that it can remember, That's Bp - BBp. Universal machine are like that. Those are just letters and symbols. What or who makes them mean something and why? Bp means that some universal machine utters p. Absolutely. Independently of you and me. But not independently of the universal machine's sense-motive experience. It has to be able to tell the difference between p and something else and characterize the nature of that difference. It has to have the motive power to 'utter', and something has to have the sense receptivity to detect that something might have been uttered. Otherwise there is no uttering. BBp means that the same universal machine now utters Bp. For any arithmetic (or equivalent) proposition, Bp BBp, means that if that machine utters p, it will soon or later utters Bp. So if I utter 'Toast is square', that means that eventually I will utter 'I utter Toast is square' and then 'I utter I utter I utter I utter Toast is squalre'? And that is a theorem of arithmetic, making it true independently of you and me. I never argue that sense is dependent on human consciousness at all. Sense is universal and literally older than time itself. and can experience that memory as an event. It needs to know what kinds of strings of remembered digits constitute a meaningful pattern, or that there could even be such a thing as a pattern. To say that patterns appear and reappear in arithmetic takes the appearance of pattern itself for granted, then usurps the primacy of the sense experience which provides it. Not really, for it appears and reappears only in the mind of universal numbers. It makes sense for them, and indeed they will be astonished that apparent material can lead to that sense. But although locally true, this is globally wrong. Sense is necessarily a first person notion, and relies on the abstract but real configuration involving infinities of arithmetical relations. I don't think sense is a first person notion, it is the very capacity to define first person and third person as separate (opposite) on one level, and united on another. Sense creates the arithmetical relations, but not infinitely. Arithmetical relations are derived a posteriori of sense embodiments. You confuse arithmetic and the human's apprehension of arithmetic. Not at all. You are assuming that arithmetic is conceivable outside of some kind of sense faculty and I don't see any reason to agree
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 17, 10:57 am, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net wrote: Nice! I read your reply after I posted, it's cool that we seem to be independently thinking along the same lines. Craig -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On 17 May 2012, at 18:04, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 17, 9:50 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 17 May 2012, at 14:21, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 17, 5:49 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 16 May 2012, at 17:37, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 16, 10:41 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 15 May 2012, at 19:44, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 15, 1:03 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: But a deterministic world, if rich enough to add and multiply, and thus to contain universal internal observers, leads already to indeterminist first person realities (even without comp, although it is simpler to use comp to justify this). If a wave washes one pile of sand onto another, thereby 'adding' them together, why does that generate universal internal observers? Adding is not enough. You need multiplication, and iteration. Then universal digital creatures appear, by logical consequences, and, as always, reflect themselves and all universal creatures, digital, and non digital, which leads them to harder and harder problems and questions. Even if that's true, from where do they appear? To say they appear is to admit that they are not themselves contained within addition or multiplication. They are. Anything Turing emulable appears, and reappears in arithmetic, related to bigger and bigger natural numbers. The appearance is contingent though, upon something being able to recognize the pattern which is appearing to them. That's correct. It is contingent of the universal number, and the universal numbers making the first one more relatively probable. But all that exist in arithmetic. What are the properties of arithmetic contingent on? The idea is that such properties are not contingent. That's still an idea though, ie sense. Sense doesn't need that property since it can't be explained any other way. I can explain arithmetic sense as a category of sense, but I can't explain sense as a category of arithmetic unless you just tack it on and say it must be part of the package inherently. Sense and matter is what I search an explanation for. You start at the finishing line. You could take any universal system, instead of arithmetic. From the computability perspective, they are equivalent. You can run over anything with a large enough steam roller and it will be flat. If you don't use a computability perspective, they aren't equivalent. Which is a defect, imo. That pattern recognition is not automatically guaranteed by any arithmetic logic. In your non-comp theory. We need a physical machine that remembers that it can remember, That's Bp - BBp. Universal machine are like that. Those are just letters and symbols. What or who makes them mean something and why? Bp means that some universal machine utters p. Absolutely. Independently of you and me. But not independently of the universal machine's sense-motive experience. It has to be able to tell the difference between p and something else and characterize the nature of that difference. It has to have the motive power to 'utter', and something has to have the sense receptivity to detect that something might have been uttered. Otherwise there is no uttering. That part is let to the observer to judge. BBp means that the same universal machine now utters Bp. For any arithmetic (or equivalent) proposition, Bp BBp, means that if that machine utters p, it will soon or later utters Bp. So if I utter 'Toast is square', that means that eventually I will utter 'I utter Toast is square' and then 'I utter I utter I utter I utter Toast is squalre'? In principle, except that all universal machine get bored and stop for contingent reason. But to do the math, some simplification are in order. And that is a theorem of arithmetic, making it true independently of you and me. I never argue that sense is dependent on human consciousness at all. Sense is universal and literally older than time itself. I have no clue what is that sense and how it related to the use of the word sense. and can experience that memory as an event. It needs to know what kinds of strings of remembered digits constitute a meaningful pattern, or that there could even be such a thing as a pattern. To say that patterns appear and reappear in arithmetic takes the appearance of pattern itself for granted, then usurps the primacy of the sense experience which provides it. Not really, for it appears and reappears only in the mind of universal numbers. It makes sense for them, and indeed they will be astonished that apparent material can lead to that sense. But although locally true, this is globally wrong. Sense is necessarily a first person notion, and relies on the abstract but real configuration involving infinities of arithmetical relations. I don't think sense is a first person notion, it is the very capacity to define first person
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 17, 2:04 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Sense and matter is what I search an explanation for. You start at the finishing line. That's why you are looking at it upside down. There isn't an explanation for explanation. It is both the start and finish line. You could take any universal system, instead of arithmetic. From the computability perspective, they are equivalent. You can run over anything with a large enough steam roller and it will be flat. If you don't use a computability perspective, they aren't equivalent. Which is a defect, imo. It depends what you are trying to do. Flat hamsters probably make fine footwear. That pattern recognition is not automatically guaranteed by any arithmetic logic. In your non-comp theory. We need a physical machine that remembers that it can remember, That's Bp - BBp. Universal machine are like that. Those are just letters and symbols. What or who makes them mean something and why? Bp means that some universal machine utters p. Absolutely. Independently of you and me. But not independently of the universal machine's sense-motive experience. It has to be able to tell the difference between p and something else and characterize the nature of that difference. It has to have the motive power to 'utter', and something has to have the sense receptivity to detect that something might have been uttered. Otherwise there is no uttering. That part is let to the observer to judge. The fact that it is left to the observer to judge supports the necessity of sense-motive participation. BBp means that the same universal machine now utters Bp. For any arithmetic (or equivalent) proposition, Bp BBp, means that if that machine utters p, it will soon or later utters Bp. So if I utter 'Toast is square', that means that eventually I will utter 'I utter Toast is square' and then 'I utter I utter I utter I utter Toast is squalre'? In principle, except that all universal machine get bored and stop for contingent reason. But to do the math, some simplification are in order. If I'm a UM though, I don't seem to be doing that. I don't seem to be recapitulating the recapitulation of everything I've ever done continuously. And that is a theorem of arithmetic, making it true independently of you and me. I never argue that sense is dependent on human consciousness at all. Sense is universal and literally older than time itself. I have no clue what is that sense and how it related to the use of the word sense. Sense should be self defining, but to be technical I'll say that it is detection, participation, and organizing relations between anything and everything. and can experience that memory as an event. It needs to know what kinds of strings of remembered digits constitute a meaningful pattern, or that there could even be such a thing as a pattern. To say that patterns appear and reappear in arithmetic takes the appearance of pattern itself for granted, then usurps the primacy of the sense experience which provides it. Not really, for it appears and reappears only in the mind of universal numbers. It makes sense for them, and indeed they will be astonished that apparent material can lead to that sense. But although locally true, this is globally wrong. Sense is necessarily a first person notion, and relies on the abstract but real configuration involving infinities of arithmetical relations. I don't think sense is a first person notion, it is the very capacity to define first person and third person as separate (opposite) on one level, and united on another. Sense creates the arithmetical relations, but not infinitely. Arithmetical relations are derived a posteriori of sense embodiments. You confuse arithmetic and the human's apprehension of arithmetic. Not at all. You are assuming that arithmetic is conceivable outside of some kind of sense faculty That would not make ... sense. You need a conceptor to conceive. But you don't need one to make a proposition true or false. You need a conceptor to even make a proposition in the first place. True or false is a second order logic on top of that. The idea that you don't need a subject to make a proposition true or false is no different to me than the assumption of primitive matter. True to who? In what context? If you get rid of all of the matter and energy in the cosmos, what truth there be? Truth about what? Emptiness? and I don't see any reason to agree with that. It doesn't have to be human apprehension at all, it could be anything from a single atom to the totality of all mass-energy of the cosmos as a single unit...or even some other sensible-but-real entity beyond our ability to conceive through human sense. All of it has to make sense in some way to some thing. Something has to detect something. This explain what you start from an observer
Re: Free will in MWI
On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 1:28 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: But a deterministic world, if rich enough to add and multiply, and thus to contain universal internal observers, leads already to indeterminist first person realities (even without comp, although it is simpler to use comp to justify this). If a wave washes one pile of sand onto another, thereby 'adding' them together, why does that generate universal internal observers? I don't think you understood Bruno's original point, which was that indeterminism (i.e. true randomness) emerges as a first person phenomenon in a deterministic multiverse. There's no valid argument that indeterminism is required for consciousness or decision-making, but even if it were so, a rich enough deterministic world can still provide it. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 16, 2:39 am, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 1:28 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: But a deterministic world, if rich enough to add and multiply, and thus to contain universal internal observers, leads already to indeterminist first person realities (even without comp, although it is simpler to use comp to justify this). If a wave washes one pile of sand onto another, thereby 'adding' them together, why does that generate universal internal observers? I don't think you understood Bruno's original point, which was that indeterminism (i.e. true randomness) emerges as a first person phenomenon in a deterministic multiverse. There's no valid argument that indeterminism is required for consciousness or decision-making, but even if it were so, a rich enough deterministic world can still provide it. I don't think you understand what I understand. Of course the limitation of the 1p view excludes information relative to a 3p view, but the reverse is true as well. Indeterminism emerges as a third person phenomenon in that subjective privacy cannot be experienced through it. Determinism emerges as both a first and third person phenomenon in the form of sense. Motive or will (or 'energy' in third person') emerges as an orthogonal category relative to determinism; self-determination, which is the impulse and capacity to make the indetermined determined. 'I am become will, the collapser of wave functions.' Craig Craig -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On 15 May 2012, at 19:44, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 15, 1:03 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: But a deterministic world, if rich enough to add and multiply, and thus to contain universal internal observers, leads already to indeterminist first person realities (even without comp, although it is simpler to use comp to justify this). If a wave washes one pile of sand onto another, thereby 'adding' them together, why does that generate universal internal observers? Adding is not enough. You need multiplication, and iteration. Then universal digital creatures appear, by logical consequences, and, as always, reflect themselves and all universal creatures, digital, and non digital, which leads them to harder and harder problems and questions. Even if that's true, from where do they appear? To say they appear is to admit that they are not themselves contained within addition or multiplication. They are. Anything Turing emulable appears, and reappears in arithmetic, related to bigger and bigger natural numbers. To say they are creatures implies a creation. Why not. You could say that they are created by the addition and multiplication laws. You need only to bet that 1+1=2 and alike does not depend on us. What necessary logic turns a nuclear chain reaction (addition and multiplication) into a nursery for problem solving sentience? The same logic making tiny system Turing universal. Usually some small part of classical logic is enough. Bruno Craig -- 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 . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 16, 10:41 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 15 May 2012, at 19:44, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 15, 1:03 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: But a deterministic world, if rich enough to add and multiply, and thus to contain universal internal observers, leads already to indeterminist first person realities (even without comp, although it is simpler to use comp to justify this). If a wave washes one pile of sand onto another, thereby 'adding' them together, why does that generate universal internal observers? Adding is not enough. You need multiplication, and iteration. Then universal digital creatures appear, by logical consequences, and, as always, reflect themselves and all universal creatures, digital, and non digital, which leads them to harder and harder problems and questions. Even if that's true, from where do they appear? To say they appear is to admit that they are not themselves contained within addition or multiplication. They are. Anything Turing emulable appears, and reappears in arithmetic, related to bigger and bigger natural numbers. The appearance is contingent though, upon something being able to recognize the pattern which is appearing to them. That pattern recognition is not automatically guaranteed by any arithmetic logic. We need a physical machine that remembers that it can remember, and can experience that memory as an event. It needs to know what kinds of strings of remembered digits constitute a meaningful pattern, or that there could even be such a thing as a pattern. To say that patterns appear and reappear in arithmetic takes the appearance of pattern itself for granted, then usurps the primacy of the sense experience which provides it. To say they are creatures implies a creation. Why not. You could say that they are created by the addition and multiplication laws. You need only to bet that 1+1=2 and alike does not depend on us. Because there's no mathematical logic to how or why that creation could occur. If we posit a universe of arithmetic realism, how can we accept that it falls off a cliff when it comes to the arithmetic of it's own origins? What makes 1+1=2? Sense. Not primitive sense either, but high order cognitive abstraction. There is no '1' or '2' literally, they are ideas about our common sense - what we have in common with everything. Numbers are literally 'figures', symbols which can be applied mentally to represent many things, and to deploy orderly control of some physical systems - but not everything can be reduced to or controlled by numbers. What necessary logic turns a nuclear chain reaction (addition and multiplication) into a nursery for problem solving sentience? The same logic making tiny system Turing universal. Usually some small part of classical logic is enough. Why would any kind of universality or logic entail the automatic development of sentience? What is logical about sentience? Craig -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On Tue, May 15, 2012 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: That's exactly what a sore looser would say after he'd been thoroughly beaten by a opponent. If I were beaten by a human opponent, why would I accuse them of not making decisions? What does winning or losing a game against a non-person have to do with awareness and subjectivity? If you get run over by a car does that mean it's suspicious if you state that the driver was at fault and not the car? That's a awful lot of questions and they all seem related to figuring out why I wrote what I did, and yet I don't see how that can possibly be the case. You think I have this thing you call free will and you say that means I'm not deterministic, so asking me the reason I wrote that sentence you don't like makes no sense, if I'm not deterministic then obviously there is no reason whatsoever I wrote that sentence. And someone might think my sentence cause you to write your list of questions, that is to say you wouldn't have written what you did if I didn't first write what I did; but no, you have free will too so you wrote what you did for no reason just like me and it must have been a coincidence that your list of questions came out right after my sentence. And you believe that although there was no reason behind your list of questions it was not random either, it was caused by nothing and it wasn't caused by nothing, and that doesn't make the free will noise a logical self contradiction because,..., because,... because you just don't want it to be contradictory and if you wish hard enough you can make it so. And even I could beat Kasparov at chess if a robot or a surgeon first gave Kasparov a brain lobotomy. But Kasparov would know the difference. Deep Blue never would. Machines can detect when they have suffered damage just like people, otherwise the red warning light on the dashboard of your car would never come on. John K Clark -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 16, 12:41 pm, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, May 15, 2012 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: That's exactly what a sore looser would say after he'd been thoroughly beaten by a opponent. If I were beaten by a human opponent, why would I accuse them of not making decisions? What does winning or losing a game against a non-person have to do with awareness and subjectivity? If you get run over by a car does that mean it's suspicious if you state that the driver was at fault and not the car? That's a awful lot of questions and they all seem related to figuring out why I wrote what I did, and yet I don't see how that can possibly be the case. You think I have this thing you call free will and you say that means I'm not deterministic, I don't say that means you're not deterministic, I say that means you can make determinations. Sometimes those determinations are influenced more by conditions you perceive as external to yourself, and sometimes it is you who are influencing external conditions. The result is that you are neither 100% deterministic nor 100% indeterministic. so asking me the reason I wrote that sentence you don't like makes no sense, if I'm not deterministic then obviously there is no reason whatsoever I wrote that sentence. I didn't ask you the reason you wrote that sentence, I was giving examples of how the reasoning you used in that sentence applied to another situation doesn't work. I point this out only to present an alternative to you that you can voluntarily choose to reason differently if it makes the same sense to you as it does to me. If you are completely deterministic, then how do you know that the car isn't driving you instead of you driving a car? There are stories about the drug scopolomine being used to turn people into 'zombies' in Columbia...whether there is any truth to those stories or not, the fact that we understand the difference between someone who is able to determine their own actions vs someone who is under the control of another would need to be explained in a deterministic world. What difference could it make who controls you, when everyone is controlled by physical forces? And someone might think my sentence cause you to write your list of questions, that is to say you wouldn't have written what you did if I didn't first write what I did; but no, you have free will too so you wrote what you did for no reason just like me and it must have been a coincidence Some of us have been pointing out repeatedly that free will is neither fully deterministic nor random, nor fully not deterministic nor random. Just as Spring is neither fully Summer nor Winter, nor is it completely not Summer or Winter. Subjectivity sets teleological purpose as orthogonal to the objective determinism. If you insist upon arbitrarily reducing the universe to a single dimension of determined vs random, then you cannot understand consciousness as it actually is. that your list of questions came out right after my sentence. And you believe that although there was no reason behind your list of questions There were all kinds of reasons behind my listing of questions, but they were mostly my reasons. I created them by reasoning. it was not random either, it was caused by nothing and it wasn't caused by nothing, It was caused by me. I can be described as nothing or not nothing, depending on what kind of thing you are comparing me to. and that doesn't make the free will noise a logical self contradiction because,..., because,... because you just don't want it to be contradictory and if you wish hard enough you can make it so. It's not me that doesn't want it to be a contradiction, it's the universe. Determinism and randomness are ideas within the experience of conscious deliberation. Consciousness itself precedes those categories. It determines and fails to determine. Consciousness is like the mammal and determinism is the like the primate. You are flipping the taxonomy and forcing reality which is far richer and deeper than the intellect into a reduced intellectual framework that has no way to accommodate the reality of awareness, just as you can't draw a graph that explains 'dizzy' or 'sleepy'. And even I could beat Kasparov at chess if a robot or a surgeon first gave Kasparov a brain lobotomy. But Kasparov would know the difference. Deep Blue never would. Machines can detect when they have suffered damage just like people, otherwise the red warning light on the dashboard of your car would never come on. The red light doesn't grow out of the dashboard by itself like ours do though. Nothing in the car will know the difference if you remove it. Your car has no way to feel that 'It seems like something is wrong but I'm not sure what'. Craig -- 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
Re: Free will in MWI
On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 1:45 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote I don't say that [the free will noise] means you're not deterministic, I would be glad to hear you say that except that according to illogical Weinbergian logic just because something is not not deterministic does not mean its deterministic, so I don't know what the hell you mean. I say that means you can make determinations. If a determination is not made for a reason then its not a determination, it’s a crap-shoot. Sometimes those determinations are influenced more by conditions you perceive as external to yourself, Sometimes a computer's CPU works on data already in it's memory unit, and sometimes it works on newly inputted data. and sometimes it is you who are influencing external conditions. And sometimes computers output data to external things like printers or video screens or internet connections and sometimes they do not. you can voluntarily choose to reason differently Yes I can change my mind, I've done it before but in the past whenever I changed my internal programming I have always done so for a reason, if I ever find myself changing my mind for no reason then I intend to call 911 because I'm undergoing a serious medical emergency of some sort and a hardware malfunction is going on in my brain. If you are completely deterministic, then how do you know that the car isn't driving you instead of you driving a car? If I determine that the brake needs to be applied I find that my foot depresses the brake peddle and I feel (correctly I think) that I am in control. free will is neither fully deterministic nor random, nor fully not deterministic nor random. That makes no sense. You say I have free will so I don't see how randomness can help you clarify what that means because I is something but something does not cause random things to happen, nothing does, so the concept of randomness is no help at all in understanding what the ASCII sequence I have free will means. Just as Spring is neither fully Summer nor Winter, Large complex things like the weather usually happen for many reasons, but every one of those reasons themselves happened for a reason or they did not happen for a reason. And one thing is beyond dispute to any logical person, spring is summer or spring is not summer. If you insist upon arbitrarily reducing the universe to a single dimension of determined vs random, then Then I have understood the lesson taught on day one of logic 101, that X is Y or X is not Y and there is no third alternative. you cannot understand consciousness as it actually is. I'll be damned if I understand why determinism is supposed to be the enemy of consciousness or why things that happen for no reason at all, randomness, is supposed to make everything all better. that your list of questions came out right after my sentence. And you believe that although there was no reason behind your list of questions There were all kinds of reasons behind my listing of questions Yes, there are many different types of deterministic processes. I created them by reasoning. Yet another deterministic process. It was caused by me. If it's caused then it's obviously deterministic. I can be described as nothing or not nothing Obviously gibberish. It determines and fails to determine. More of the same, up is down black is white gibberish is not gibberish and clarity is nowhere to be found in your universe. John K Clark -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On 15 May 2012, at 04:48, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 14, 2:11 pm, R AM ramra...@gmail.com wrote: I'm saying that decision making, learning, and reinforcement are possible in a deterministic world, and you are not denying it. I guess our points of view are orthogonal. I am denying that meaningful decisions, learning, or reinforcement are possible in a deterministic world. But a deterministic world, if rich enough to add and multiply, and thus to contain universal internal observers, leads already to indeterminist first person realities (even without comp, although it is simpler to use comp to justify this). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 7:01 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: I would say that they cannot be meaningful in any sense, but I would allow that some may consider meaningless unconscious processes to be a form of decision, learning, or reinforcement. OK, let's take Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, According to you, Kasparov's decision making was meaningful, while Deep Blue's was not. Yet, Deep Blue won. Is this the kind of meaninglessness you are talking here? Ricardo. -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 15, 5:29 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 15 May 2012, at 04:48, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 14, 2:11 pm, R AM ramra...@gmail.com wrote: I'm saying that decision making, learning, and reinforcement are possible in a deterministic world, and you are not denying it. I guess our points of view are orthogonal. I am denying that meaningful decisions, learning, or reinforcement are possible in a deterministic world. But a deterministic world, if rich enough to add and multiply, and thus to contain universal internal observers, leads already to indeterminist first person realities (even without comp, although it is simpler to use comp to justify this). If a wave washes one pile of sand onto another, thereby 'adding' them together, why does that generate universal internal observers? Craig -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 15, 7:19 am, R AM ramra...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 7:01 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: I would say that they cannot be meaningful in any sense, but I would allow that some may consider meaningless unconscious processes to be a form of decision, learning, or reinforcement. OK, let's take Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, According to you, Kasparov's decision making was meaningful, while Deep Blue's was not. Yet, Deep Blue won. Is this the kind of meaninglessness you are talking here? Yes. Deep Blue didn't know the difference between winning or losing, let alone care. It doesn't know how to play Chess, it only compares statistics which we apply to Chess playing. Deep Blue could be executing a thermonuclear holocaust instead of winning a game and it would never know the difference. Kasparov knows the difference though. He is playing the game and winning or losing means something to him. Craig -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 5:36 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: On May 15, 7:19 am, R AM ramra...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 7:01 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: I would say that they cannot be meaningful in any sense, but I would allow that some may consider meaningless unconscious processes to be a form of decision, learning, or reinforcement. OK, let's take Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, According to you, Kasparov's decision making was meaningful, while Deep Blue's was not. Yet, Deep Blue won. Is this the kind of meaninglessness you are talking here? Yes. Deep Blue didn't know the difference between winning or losing, let alone care. The fact remains that good decision making can take place in a deterministic world. Some decision-making you will label as meaningful, some as meaningless. But good decision-making nevertheless. You cannot win chess withouth making good decisions. Ricardo. -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 15, 11:59 am, R AM ramra...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 5:36 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: On May 15, 7:19 am, R AM ramra...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 7:01 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: I would say that they cannot be meaningful in any sense, but I would allow that some may consider meaningless unconscious processes to be a form of decision, learning, or reinforcement. OK, let's take Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, According to you, Kasparov's decision making was meaningful, while Deep Blue's was not. Yet, Deep Blue won. Is this the kind of meaninglessness you are talking here? Yes. Deep Blue didn't know the difference between winning or losing, let alone care. The fact remains that good decision making can take place in a deterministic world. Some decision-making you will label as meaningful, some as meaningless. But good decision-making nevertheless. You cannot win chess withouth making good decisions. I don't think Deep Blue makes any decisions or wins chess, it just compares statistics and orders them according to an externally provided criteria. It is a filing cabinet of possible chess games that matches any particular supplied pattern to a designated outcome. We are able to project our own ideas and expectations onto our experience of Deep Blue, but that doesn't mean that there is any actual decision making going on. There is no decision, only automatic recursive reactions. A programmer could easily change Deep Blue to lose every match or to command a robotic arm to smash it's CPUs. How can good decision making be claimed if it can just as easily be programmed to make bad decisions? There is no symbol grounding. Craig -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 6:19 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: On May 15, 11:59 am, R AM ramra...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 5:36 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: On May 15, 7:19 am, R AM ramra...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 7:01 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: I would say that they cannot be meaningful in any sense, but I would allow that some may consider meaningless unconscious processes to be a form of decision, learning, or reinforcement. OK, let's take Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, According to you, Kasparov's decision making was meaningful, while Deep Blue's was not. Yet, Deep Blue won. Is this the kind of meaninglessness you are talking here? Yes. Deep Blue didn't know the difference between winning or losing, let alone care. The fact remains that good decision making can take place in a deterministic world. Some decision-making you will label as meaningful, some as meaningless. But good decision-making nevertheless. You cannot win chess withouth making good decisions. I don't think Deep Blue makes any decisions or wins chess, I'm not sure what you don't see here. Deep Blue has several possible moves and chooses one of them (just as Kasparov does). It makes a decision each move. And given that it eventually gets to check-mate, Deep Blue wins chess. it just compares statistics and orders them according to an externally provided criteria. It is a filing cabinet of possible chess games that matches any particular supplied pattern to a designated outcome. We are able to project our own ideas and expectations onto our experience of Deep Blue, but that doesn't mean that there is any actual decision making going on. There is no decision, only automatic recursive reactions. Deep Blue decides what piece to move and where to move it. That counts as a decision to me. A programmer could easily change Deep Blue to lose every match or to command a robotic arm to smash it's CPUs. How can good decision making be claimed if it can just as easily be programmed to make bad decisions? Because Deep Blue wins chess? How else can you win chess except by making good decisions? Ultimately both Kasparov and Deep Blue make a move. Ricardo. There is no symbol grounding. Craig -- 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. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Free will in MWI
On Tue, May 15, 2012 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: I don't think Deep Blue makes any decisions or wins chess, That's exactly what a sore looser would say after he'd been thoroughly beaten by a opponent. And so the last surviving member of the species Homo Sapiens, 4 seconds before the Godlike computer sent it to oblivion forever, turned to the Jupiter Brain and said nevertheless I still think I'm *really* smarter than you. it just [...] But Kasparov's brain just did stuff too, only deep Blue's stuff worked better. It is a filing cabinet of possible chess games that matches any particular supplied pattern to a designated outcome. The observable universe is not large enough to contain a filing cabinet full of all possible chess games. A programmer could easily change Deep Blue to lose every match or to command a robotic arm to smash it's CPUs. And even I could beat Kasparov at chess if a robot or a surgeon first gave Kasparov a brain lobotomy. John K Clark -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On 15 May 2012, at 17:28, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 15, 5:29 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 15 May 2012, at 04:48, Craig Weinberg wrote: On May 14, 2:11 pm, R AM ramra...@gmail.com wrote: I'm saying that decision making, learning, and reinforcement are possible in a deterministic world, and you are not denying it. I guess our points of view are orthogonal. I am denying that meaningful decisions, learning, or reinforcement are possible in a deterministic world. But a deterministic world, if rich enough to add and multiply, and thus to contain universal internal observers, leads already to indeterminist first person realities (even without comp, although it is simpler to use comp to justify this). If a wave washes one pile of sand onto another, thereby 'adding' them together, why does that generate universal internal observers? Adding is not enough. You need multiplication, and iteration. Then universal digital creatures appear, by logical consequences, and, as always, reflect themselves and all universal creatures, digital, and non digital, which leads them to harder and harder problems and questions. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 15, 12:47 pm, R AM ramra...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 6:19 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: On May 15, 11:59 am, R AM ramra...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 5:36 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: On May 15, 7:19 am, R AM ramra...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 7:01 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: I would say that they cannot be meaningful in any sense, but I would allow that some may consider meaningless unconscious processes to be a form of decision, learning, or reinforcement. OK, let's take Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, According to you, Kasparov's decision making was meaningful, while Deep Blue's was not. Yet, Deep Blue won. Is this the kind of meaninglessness you are talking here? Yes. Deep Blue didn't know the difference between winning or losing, let alone care. The fact remains that good decision making can take place in a deterministic world. Some decision-making you will label as meaningful, some as meaningless. But good decision-making nevertheless. You cannot win chess withouth making good decisions. I don't think Deep Blue makes any decisions or wins chess, I'm not sure what you don't see here. But I am sure what you don't see. Deep Blue has several possible moves and chooses one of them (just as Kasparov does). It makes a decision each move. And given that it eventually gets to check-mate, Deep Blue wins chess. That's only the view of a human being who is familiar with chess. Deep Blue is neither a human or familiar with chess. When you add 5+6 into a calculator, it does not 'decide' that the answer is 11 any more than a square peg decides it doesn't fit in a round hole. If Deep Blue had a perspective, which it doesn't, it would have no idea who Kasparov is or that he was the opponent. No clue that check-mating Kasparov is good or that being check-mated is bad. The game of chess is in the eye of the beholder, not in the computation of statistics. it just compares statistics and orders them according to an externally provided criteria. It is a filing cabinet of possible chess games that matches any particular supplied pattern to a designated outcome. We are able to project our own ideas and expectations onto our experience of Deep Blue, but that doesn't mean that there is any actual decision making going on. There is no decision, only automatic recursive reactions. Deep Blue decides what piece to move and where to move it. That counts as a decision to me. I understand that, I'm just trying to tell you why that doesn't work. Deep Blue decides nothing. We use Deep Blue to inform us what the most mathematically efficient chess move is and then we can choose to imagine that we are playing a game against an entity that is deciding to make those moves. There is no entity there though. The computer is a puppet. A programmer could easily change Deep Blue to lose every match or to command a robotic arm to smash it's CPUs. How can good decision making be claimed if it can just as easily be programmed to make bad decisions? Because Deep Blue wins chess? How else can you win chess except by making good decisions? Ultimately both Kasparov and Deep Blue make a move. You can win chess by looking at every possible outcome of every possible move and putting them in order of how few moves will likely end the game in your favor. There is no decision at all, you are just organizing a stack of finite patterns in order of probable efficiency. There is nothing to decide, you just solve the math problem and report the result as your move. It's an idiot's way of playing chess, albeit a very, very fast idiot. Craig -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 15, 12:56 pm, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, May 15, 2012 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: I don't think Deep Blue makes any decisions or wins chess, That's exactly what a sore looser would say after he'd been thoroughly beaten by a opponent. If I were beaten by a human opponent, why would I accuse them of not making decisions? What does winning or losing a game against a non- person have to do with awareness and subjectivity? If you get run over by a car does that mean it's suspicious if you state that the driver was at fault and not the car? And so the last surviving member of the species Homo Sapiens, 4 seconds before the Godlike computer sent it to oblivion forever, turned to the Jupiter Brain and said nevertheless I still think I'm *really* smarter than you. I'm not sure why you want to make this about human exceptionalism. Maybe you have an issue with superiority, but I don't. I'm really not a big fan of our species. It means nothing to me to be 'better than a computer' and anyone who it would mean something to I would consider pretty juvenile. This is about making sense of what the difference between a living organism and an inorganic machine actually is. Machines have capacities that organisms don't, and vice versa. So what? it just [...] But Kasparov's brain just did stuff too, only deep Blue's stuff worked better. A car can beat a person running on foot too, but that doesn't mean a car has legs or runs. Apples aren't oranges. It is a filing cabinet of possible chess games that matches any particular supplied pattern to a designated outcome. The observable universe is not large enough to contain a filing cabinet full of all possible chess games. It doesn't have to have all possible chess games, only the ones which relate to the opponent's pattern. A programmer could easily change Deep Blue to lose every match or to command a robotic arm to smash it's CPUs. And even I could beat Kasparov at chess if a robot or a surgeon first gave Kasparov a brain lobotomy. But Kasparov would know the difference. Deep Blue never would. Deep Blue would happily lose the same game over and over forever with a few changes to its code. It would never beg you to kill them like someone with a lobotomy might. Craig -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 15, 1:03 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: But a deterministic world, if rich enough to add and multiply, and thus to contain universal internal observers, leads already to indeterminist first person realities (even without comp, although it is simpler to use comp to justify this). If a wave washes one pile of sand onto another, thereby 'adding' them together, why does that generate universal internal observers? Adding is not enough. You need multiplication, and iteration. Then universal digital creatures appear, by logical consequences, and, as always, reflect themselves and all universal creatures, digital, and non digital, which leads them to harder and harder problems and questions. Even if that's true, from where do they appear? To say they appear is to admit that they are not themselves contained within addition or multiplication. To say they are creatures implies a creation. What necessary logic turns a nuclear chain reaction (addition and multiplication) into a nursery for problem solving sentience? Craig -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 15, 3:14 pm, R AM ramra...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 7:22 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: Deep Blue has several possible moves and chooses one of them (just as Kasparov does). It makes a decision each move. And given that it eventually gets to check-mate, Deep Blue wins chess. That's only the view of a human being who is familiar with chess. I agree that we are not talking about frogs watching chess games. But a human being watching the match will see that Deep Blue makes decisions and wins the game. Just as a human watching a ventriloquist hold a piece of articulated lumber will see a dummy making conversation and getting laughs. Deep Too deep apparently. Blue is neither a human or familiar with chess. When you add 5+6 into a calculator, it does not 'decide' that the answer is 11 any more than a square peg decides it doesn't fit in a round hole. If Deep Blue had a perspective, which it doesn't, it would have no idea who Kasparov is or that he was the opponent. No clue that check-mating Kasparov is good or that being check-mated is bad. The game of chess is in the eye of the beholder, not in the computation of statistics. To me, a good decision in the context of chess is that which allows to win a chess game. Everything else is pretty irrelevant. What is your definition for a good chess decision? You are taking for granted that there is a context of chess to begin with. That context is a human expectation, not an independent fact. For Deep Blue there is no chess and no decision, only blind computation. A good chess decision is one which leads to an enjoyable experience of playing the game of chess. It's one which adds meaning to the game for you and your opponent, and perhaps an audience, which lingers in people's memory for it's elegant strategy, unique style, effectiveness, historic significance, etc. Would chess continue to exist if it was only being played by Deep Blue against an identical computer? What would the be the point? Deep Blue decides what piece to move and where to move it. That counts as a decision to me. I understand that, I'm just trying to tell you why that doesn't work. Deep Blue decides nothing. We use Deep Blue to inform us what the most mathematically efficient chess move is and then we can choose to imagine that we are playing a game against an entity that is deciding to make those moves. There is no entity there though. The computer is a puppet. There are two entities there. One is Kasparov and the other one is Deep Blue. Deep Blue isn't real. It's a name that was given for specially assembled and configured microelectronics. Kasparov knows who he is. He is a living person. Deep Blue knows no more than a collection of thousands of mousetraps arranged in a particular series. Both of them decide what pieces to move. In fact, they move them. Nobody is imagining anything. That is what we see. The computer doesn't decide anything. It moves the only way that it can move given it's programmed parameters. You can't see someone make a decision, you can only infer that they are making one. Inferring that a computer is making a decision is pure anthropomorphizing projection as far I can see. It's no different from seeing THANK YOU on a trash can lid and insisting that means that you aren't imagining that the trash can is being polite. You can win chess by looking at every possible outcome of every possible move and putting them in order of how few moves will likely end the game in your favor. There is no decision at all, you are just organizing a stack of finite patterns in order of probable efficiency. That's a decision to me: several alternatives and the ability to rank them. I understand, but it's not a meaningful definition of decision to me. Does a funnel make a decision when you pour different sized pebbles into it? if you had complete information, that's how you should decide things. Should a human being do otherwise if he had perfect knowledge? Yes. Knowledge is only one aspect of sense. Having perfect knowledge is a dead end if decisions can't be informed by innovation, creativity, humor, compassion, etc. There is nothing to decide, you just solve the math problem and report the result as your move. The problem is that in the case of chess, the math problem cannot be solved exactly, not even close, with the resources available currently (probably never). Both Kasparov and Deep Blue must resort to heuristics, previous knowledge, and learning. Deep Blue also loses games, it has not perfect knowledge. The degree to which Deep Blue's computation is perfect or not has nothing to do with whether it makes decisions or not. If I tell Deep Blue This is a really important game, so try harder to win or we are going to scrap you, it has no way of 'trying harder'. It can only execute the meaningless sequence of computations which we have
Re: Free will in MWI
Hi Stephen, On 13 May 2012, at 19:17, Stephen P. King wrote: On 5/13/2012 9:21 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 12 May 2012, at 19:50, John Clark wrote: On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 8:34 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: although machines can be said determined, they are not entirely determined from what they can know about themselves at the time they decide to act. As I've said many many times, Turing proved in 1936 that in general there is no shortcut and the only way to know what a machine will do is to watch it and see, even the machine does not know what it will do until it does it. Hi Bruno, OK. That is the relative indeterminacy that we can use to give meaning to choice, responsibiliy, free will. Nothing to do with quantum, or with the comp first person indeterminacy. Is the relative indeterminacy a uniform measure? No, it is context dependent. It might be, intuitively, the limit of the uniform measure of the finite section UD_n of UD*. This creates the needed contexts in the limit. The Turing indeterminacy is not an absolute indeterminacy.What the amchine will do or not is entirely determined by arithmetical truth. It is just that we, observing the machine, cannot know the result in advance. But the result is independent of us, and mathematically well defined. This cannot know the results in advance is the SAT problem that I keep trying to get you to look at! That is not Turing universal. By the first person indeterminacy, the complexity is higher in the hierarchy complexity. All that verbiage about independent of us and mathematically well defined is rubbish and you know it! Er, no, I don't know that. You are assuming something that you cannot actually do, pretending that you have access to infinite resources and still are you. That is where your narrative breaks down. This is a bit unclear. We cannot avoid the infinite resource once physics relies on a global (on UD*) first person indeterminacy. It [free will] means the ability to chose among a set of future possibilities So free will means the ability to choose and the ability to choose means you have free will, and round and round we go. The ability to communicate a reasoning as to why we did what we did = free will. Right. The ability to choose is a good first approximation of free will. It is not exactly that, because you can choose by throwing a coin, and this wold be a case of choice without free will. So it is probably closer to the ability of making a responsible choice. No amount of mental contortions can avoid the fact that you made the choice for a reason or you did not make the choice for a reason. You're a coo coo clock or a roulette wheel, there is no third alternative. No problem with that. Situation like that abounds in the laws, jurisprudence, And that's why jurisprudence works so poorly and contains so many self contradictions. Yes. But it is jurisprudence that actually solves otherwise intractable problems in the real world. Sure. Jurisprudence is full of contradiction, but that's the case in human real life. It is still better than no jurisprudence. The idea that we can create a world where all decisions are done in advance is a fatally flawed fantasy. Sure. Bruno although he is determined, he can't be aware of the determination. That's what Turing proved and I've been saying for months. So what are we arguing about? To put light on free will, choice, responsibility, etc. Free-will is a higher order relational notion, and it is totally unrelated to the determinacy question Oh I'd forgotten, that's what we're arguing about. ? You just it above: the ability of making non random choice, or of doing reasonable choice, or responsible choice, in absence of complete information, I would add. And more! :-D Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- Onward! Stephen Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. ~ Francis Bacon -- 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 . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
I'm saying that decision making, learning, and reinforcement are possible in a deterministic world, and you are not denying it. I guess our points of view are orthogonal. Ricardo. On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 12:19 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: On May 13, 4:19 pm, R AM ramra...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 6:19 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: On May 13, 11:46 am, R AM ramra...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 3:27 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: What would be the point of learning though? What would be the difference between any one outcome and any other one if decision making were determined? It is only because of our own experience of free will that we can project some significance of any particular outcome. Maybe it is because of the significance of outcomes that we believe to have free will. That assumes a possibility of significance without it. I don't think that can be supported. I don't see what free will has to do with the outcomes of surviving or not surviving. If you have free will, then the outcome of not surviving presents the ultimate threat to the continuation of free will, as well as the complete loss of subjective significance and the expectation of negative sensory experiences. If there were no free will, then outcomes of surviving or not surviving would not be significantly different...they would only be two differently numbered addresses in an infinite sequence of meaningless outcomes. Evolution doesn't care how species mutate or whether individuals survive, why should the individuals themselves care either? Because individuals that care about outcomes survive? Only if they translate that care into behavior using their free will. Without free will, care is meaningless to survival. Individuals that care about outcomes survive. You already said that but you aren't addressing my reply that care in and of itself cannot impact survival. Of course this implies a behaviour directed to producing good outcomes. No free will involved. These two sentences contradict each other. Why of course? Only because through free will you can choose how to make sense of your circumstances, prioritize which outcomes are most desirable to you, and which desires you choose to act upon. This is free will. Of course free will is involved. Nothing but free will is involved. Only if we program them to act like they are doing that. They never would learn anything on their own. The fact is that learning is possible in a deterministic universe. Even if it were possible, learning would be irrelevant in a deterministic universe. Whatever. The fact remains that learning is possible in a deterministic world. And individuals that survive thanks to learning, too. It depends on what you consider learning. Does a stone worn down by the ocean 'learn' to be smooth? Blue green algae has survived for a billion years without much learning. Our sense of learning comes purely out of free will - a desire to enhance our effectiveness in making more sense and acting more effectively on that sense. Craig -- 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. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 14, 2:11 pm, R AM ramra...@gmail.com wrote: I'm saying that decision making, learning, and reinforcement are possible in a deterministic world, and you are not denying it. I guess our points of view are orthogonal. I am denying that meaningful decisions, learning, or reinforcement are possible in a deterministic world. Craig -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 12:48 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: On May 14, 2:11 pm, R AM ramra...@gmail.com wrote: I'm saying that decision making, learning, and reinforcement are possible in a deterministic world, and you are not denying it. I guess our points of view are orthogonal. I am denying that meaningful decisions, learning, or reinforcement are possible in a deterministic world. Perhaps decisions, learning and reinforcement are possible in a deterministic world but they are not meaningful in the sense you want. Would you allow that? -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 14, 11:03 pm, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 12:48 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: On May 14, 2:11 pm, R AM ramra...@gmail.com wrote: I'm saying that decision making, learning, and reinforcement are possible in a deterministic world, and you are not denying it. I guess our points of view are orthogonal. I am denying that meaningful decisions, learning, or reinforcement are possible in a deterministic world. Perhaps decisions, learning and reinforcement are possible in a deterministic world but they are not meaningful in the sense you want. Would you allow that? I would say that they cannot be meaningful in any sense, but I would allow that some may consider meaningless unconscious processes to be a form of decision, learning, or reinforcement. If comp were true that would have to be the case, but I see the symbol grounding problem/use- mention distinction as revealing why comp is not likely to be true. We may use the words 'learning' or 'deciding' figuratively to describe what a machine does, just as we might anthropomorphize a car's transmission as 'not wanting to go into fourth gear' or something, but there is no literal experience of learning, deciding, or wanting that is going on at the level at which we relate to the machine (individual physical pieces of machine material may have experiential events of some kind on a molecular level that might involve some quorum mechanical decision making, but that doesn't scale up into a greater coherence). Craig -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 6:44 AM, Pierz pier...@gmail.com wrote: I can see that. But consider that the notion of being able to change the outcome of future society - 'prevent' or 'deter' anything at all - depends on the possibility of variant futures. From the absolute perspective, such variation is impossible (or is merely random and so not subject to reason or 'choice'). So how does one justify any decision? Seen absolutely, it was inevitable and there can be no talk of a good or a bad decision. I think determinism should not be confused with fatalism (i.e. it does not matter what you do, things will turn out the same). In determinism it matters what you do, even if what you do is determined. Once an outcome is obtained, we can still analyze the contribution of decisions to that outcome, evaluate them, and most importantly, learn from them. Next time, what we have learned will be taken into account for the next decision. This can take place in a purely deterministic world. Even two deterministic (with some pseudorandomness added) computer chess players playing against each other, can learn from each other mistakes and use what they have learned for future competitions. The point is not changing future outcomes. In fact we don't know what that outcome will be. The point is obtaining good outcomes. Ricardo. -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On Sunday, May 13, 2012 6:17:12 PM UTC+10, RAM wrote: On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 6:44 AM, Pierz pier...@gmail.com wrote: I can see that. But consider that the notion of being able to change the outcome of future society - 'prevent' or 'deter' anything at all - depends on the possibility of variant futures. From the absolute perspective, such variation is impossible (or is merely random and so not subject to reason or 'choice'). So how does one justify any decision? Seen absolutely, it was inevitable and there can be no talk of a good or a bad decision. I think determinism should not be confused with fatalism (i.e. it does not matter what you do, things will turn out the same). In determinism it matters what you do, even if what you do is determined. Once an outcome is obtained, we can still analyze the contribution of decisions to that outcome, evaluate them, and most importantly, learn from them. Next time, what we have learned will be taken into account for the next decision. This can take place in a purely deterministic world. Even two deterministic (with some pseudorandomness added) computer chess players playing against each other, can learn from each other mistakes and use what they have learned for future competitions. Obviously, I agree with you. Because the decision-maker is part of the deterministic process, the determinism of the system as a whole is irrelevant from his/her point of view. I am saying that given that any decision-maker is embedded in a relative local system in this way, the idea of free will makes local sense - ie, there are good and bad decisions, easy and difficult decisions, and the idea of morality remain coherent, despite the determinism that is apparent from a God's eye view. I did not say it does not matter what you do, things will turn out the same. Quite the reverse. The point is not changing future outcomes. In fact we don't know what that outcome will be. The point is obtaining good outcomes. Ricardo. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/8Qg4plyS9pgJ. 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On 12 May 2012, at 19:50, John Clark wrote: On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 8:34 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: although machines can be said determined, they are not entirely determined from what they can know about themselves at the time they decide to act. As I've said many many times, Turing proved in 1936 that in general there is no shortcut and the only way to know what a machine will do is to watch it and see, even the machine does not know what it will do until it does it. OK. That is the relative indeterminacy that we can use to give meaning to choice, responsibiliy, free will. Nothing to do with quantum, or with the comp first person indeterminacy. The Turing indeterminacy is not an absolute indeterminacy.What the amchine will do or not is entirely determined by arithmetical truth. It is just that we, observing the machine, cannot know the result in advance. But the result is independent of us, and mathematically well defined. It [free will] means the ability to chose among a set of future possibilities So free will means the ability to choose and the ability to choose means you have free will, and round and round we go. Right. The ability to choose is a good first approximation of free will. It is not exactly that, because you can choose by throwing a coin, and this wold be a case of choice without free will. So it is probably closer to the ability of making a responsible choice. No amount of mental contortions can avoid the fact that you made the choice for a reason or you did not make the choice for a reason. You're a coo coo clock or a roulette wheel, there is no third alternative. No problem with that. Situation like that abounds in the laws, jurisprudence, And that's why jurisprudence works so poorly and contains so many self contradictions. Yes. although he is determined, he can't be aware of the determination. That's what Turing proved and I've been saying for months. So what are we arguing about? To put light on free will, choice, responsibility, etc. Free-will is a higher order relational notion, and it is totally unrelated to the determinacy question Oh I'd forgotten, that's what we're arguing about. ? You just it above: the ability of making non random choice, or of doing reasonable choice, or responsible choice, in absence of complete information, I would add. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On May 13, 4:17 am, R AM ramra...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 6:44 AM, Pierz pier...@gmail.com wrote: I can see that. But consider that the notion of being able to change the outcome of future society - 'prevent' or 'deter' anything at all - depends on the possibility of variant futures. From the absolute perspective, such variation is impossible (or is merely random and so not subject to reason or 'choice'). So how does one justify any decision? Seen absolutely, it was inevitable and there can be no talk of a good or a bad decision. I think determinism should not be confused with fatalism (i.e. it does not matter what you do, things will turn out the same). In determinism it matters what you do, even if what you do is determined. Once an outcome is obtained, we can still analyze the contribution of decisions to that outcome, evaluate them, and most importantly, learn from them. Next time, what we have learned will be taken into account for the next decision. This can take place in a purely deterministic world. What would be the point of learning though? What would be the difference between any one outcome and any other one if decision making were determined? It is only because of our own experience of free will that we can project some significance of any particular outcome. Evolution doesn't care how species mutate or whether individuals survive, why should the individuals themselves care either? Even two deterministic (with some pseudorandomness added) computer chess players playing against each other, can learn from each other mistakes and use what they have learned for future competitions. Only if we program them to act like they are doing that. They never would learn anything on their own. The point is not changing future outcomes. In fact we don't know what that outcome will be. The point is obtaining good outcomes. Without the existence of free will as a given, there can be no good. Craig -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On 13 May 2012, at 03:48, Pierz wrote: I remember a kid back in secondary school saying to me that if everything was determined - as seemed inevitable to him from his understanding of physics - then you might as well give up and despair, since that was inevitable anyway! I tried to explain that this was a confusion of levels between the absolute and the relative, the same point that Bruno is making. From an absolute perspective, we may be completely determined (or partially random, it makes no difference essentially), from *inside* that system, our best way of acting is *as if* free will/responsibility etc were real. Obviously, if I act as if determinism was not a cause for despair, my life is going to look a lot better than if I did, and seeing as the absolute determinism of things does not tell me which way to decide the issue, I'm forced to use my relative local wisdom to decide on the former. OK. John Clarke seems to be saying that the law is an ass, not because of human-level failures of reasoning/justice etc, but because the criminal was predestined to act the way s/he did, or behaved randomly, and in either case no reponsibility can be assigned. But the mistake here is the same as the one made by my high school friend. Yes. It is the same error, or quite related, to miss the difference between 1-view and 3-view, despite free will and 1-indeterminacy are related to different form of indeterminacy. But in both case Clark abstracts himself from the local situation, like if the local situation did not add and hide some (personal, local) information. The absolute perspective has nothing useful to say about the local/ relative one. Right. If we were to follow this philosophy, the courage of heroes such as Nelson Mandela would be no cause for Nobel Peace Prizes, OK. (BTW, since Obama get the Nobel prize of peace, for no reason, and since he made Guantanamo into US laws), I think the Nobel prize has lost a lot of its possible appeal, imho). and the acts of villains such as Anders Breivik no cause for censure, because such of their inevitability in the absolute scheme of things. The problem is that *not* censuring or *not* awarding prizes are also evaluative acts, about which determinism and the absolute perspective have nothing to say. And I believe that no-one, not even JC himself, can escape the human perspective. When he loads derision and sarcasm on other contributors' arguments, he is acting as if they had a choice in what they believed. There can be no fools in the abolute perpective, as there can be no criminals. Good point. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 3:27 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: What would be the point of learning though? What would be the difference between any one outcome and any other one if decision making were determined? It is only because of our own experience of free will that we can project some significance of any particular outcome. Maybe it is because of the significance of outcomes that we believe to have free will. Evolution doesn't care how species mutate or whether individuals survive, why should the individuals themselves care either? Because individuals that care about outcomes survive? Only if we program them to act like they are doing that. They never would learn anything on their own. The fact is that learning is possible in a deterministic universe. The point is not changing future outcomes. In fact we don't know what that outcome will be. The point is obtaining good outcomes. Without the existence of free will as a given, there can be no good. There is no problem in having good and bad outcomes in a deterministic universe. Ricardo. Craig -- 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. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.