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More article-quoting: "As computer programmers, our formative intellectual experience is working with deterministic systems that have been designed by other hu

More article-quoting: "As computer programmers, our formative intellectual experience is working with deterministic systems that have been designed by other human beings. These can be very complex, but the complexity is not the kind we find in the natural world. It is ultimately always tractable. Find the right abstractions, and the puzzle box opens before you. The feeling of competence, control and delight in discovering a clever twist that solves a difficult problem is what makes being a computer programmer sometimes enjoyable." I recently asked a friend whether he thought people were deterministic. He didn't think so (I don't either.) What do you think?

jaredhansen 9y ago
>I recently asked a friend whether he thought people were deterministic. He didn't think so (I don't either.) What do you think? It's the wrong question. People are deterministic, but that doesn't mean they're always predictable . In some sense, it's trivially true: we're physical systems, so of course* we're deterministic. The underlying physics that govern how the subatomic particles that make up the atoms that make up the molecules that make up the brain, is pretty well established at this point -- so if someone wants to assert some kind of special exemption for human brains: "everything else in the observable universe obeys physical law, but this is different!" the burden of proof is going to be pretty damn high. And nobody has ever put forth anything like real evidence for such an exemption -- the fact that "we don't understand how the brain works" doesn't mean it doesn't work in some fundamentally knowable way. However, that doesn't mean that brains are (at least with current or reasonably-foreseeable-future technology) "ultimately tractable" even in principle, much less that we have any way of getting inside brains to see what people are going to do in real time. And the reason people care about whether people are "deterministic" or not is because we want to know how to influence them, and for what we should assign praise/blame etc., and there's a common hidden assumption that determinism removes our ability to do that in some way. But I think that assumption's false (you don't see determinists just throwing up their hands and declaring ethics don't matter). There's a massive amount of physical evidence for determinism and no evidence at all against -- I'm not sure how anyone with a science background could believe otherwise at this point. * "Predictable" here means something like "predictable by other humans, including via reasonably foreseeable technology". If we're in a simulation, the simulator can, by construct, "predict" the whole thing.
- njarboe 9y ago
  I'm not sure why you think the underlying physics is deterministic. That idea was the state of the art understanding in say the 19th century (billiard balls and Newtonian physics), but quantum mechanics, at the beginning of the 20th century, fundamentally changed the understanding of reality at the lowest level. For a good layman's introduction I would suggest, "QED The Strange Theory of Light and Matter", (1986) by Feynman. Hard ideas but clear prose. I like to read it every few years to remind myself of the fundamentals.
  - RandomOpinion 9y ago
    > I'm not sure why you think the underlying physics is deterministic. If conclusive evidence were found that human consciousness is fundamentally dependent on QM processes to function, that would be a Nobel Prize-worthy discovery. Aside from some minor papers exploring the topic, no such evidence has been found AFAIK.
    - njarboe 9y ago
      The functioning of chemistry in individual cells definitely are influenced by quantum effects. Over a short period of time the functioning of the neurons in the human brain will be influenced by QM enough that the billiard ball, clock work, deterministic view of the future unfolding is not correct.
      - haZard_OS 9y ago
        It isn't enough that the processes are affected. The processes must be affected in such a way that the idea of determinism at other scales is compromised. In any event, positing some sort of "QM consciousness" does nothing to save the concept of free will. Where is the "free will" in a fundamentally random phenomenon? Whether one accepts determinism or not, the notion of free will is incoherent.
      - RandomOpinion 9y ago
        > The functioning of chemistry in individual cells definitely are influenced by quantum effects. So? Transistors used in modern computers directly depend on quantum effects (semiconductor physics was an outgrowth of QM) as well, yet we do not need to take into account QM when writing software or designing microprocessors.
_yosefk 9y ago
At my end, I wonder where the author ever saw deterministic computer systems. In my experience, you have to work really, really hard to get even a system computing outputs from inputs without processing any external events in-between to produce deterministic results, with things like floating point hardware and software and parallelism APIs, not to mention your own bugs, working overtime against you - to say nothing of faulty DRAMs and other such delightful phenomena.
839083 9y ago
I'm pretty sure that having to account for segfaults, keyboard interrupts, power outages, and other kinds of 'real world' exceptions that have to be caught means that the code might be deterministic but the computer is exposed to unexpected stimuli. People probably act in a mostly deterministic when there are rules constraining them: sports, board games, social environments, lines. Maybe we are deterministic on a neurotransmitter level. But there's little control over external stimuli.
analyst74 9y ago
People are not 100% deterministic, but evidences also show that expert con man and similarly persuasive people can trigger emotions and thoughts in others reliably.
- bobthechef 9y ago
  No contradiction between the two. Human beings have natures, habits, character, etc. That fact that, say, depriving people of food will tend to produce hunger does not contradict the idea that we have a measure of freedom in our choices. Of course, a simplistic, mechanistic view of the word will leave no space for anything but blind stuff bumping into other blind stuff, but that picture is wrong.

jaredhansen 9y ago

>I recently asked a friend whether he thought people were deterministic. He didn't think so (I don't either.) What do you think? It's the wrong question. People are deterministic, but that doesn't mean they're always predictable . In some sense, it's trivially true: we're physical systems, so of course* we're deterministic. The underlying physics that govern how the subatomic particles that make up the atoms that make up the molecules that make up the brain, is pretty well established at this point -- so if someone wants to assert some kind of special exemption for human brains: "everything else in the observable universe obeys physical law, but this is different!" the burden of proof is going to be pretty damn high. And nobody has ever put forth anything like real evidence for such an exemption -- the fact that "we don't understand how the brain works" doesn't mean it doesn't work in some fundamentally knowable way. However, that doesn't mean that brains are (at least with current or reasonably-foreseeable-future technology) "ultimately tractable" even in principle, much less that we have any way of getting inside brains to see what people are going to do in real time. And the reason people care about whether people are "deterministic" or not is because we want to know how to influence them, and for what we should assign praise/blame etc., and there's a common hidden assumption that determinism removes our ability to do that in some way. But I think that assumption's false (you don't see determinists just throwing up their hands and declaring ethics don't matter). There's a massive amount of physical evidence for determinism and no evidence at all against -- I'm not sure how anyone with a science background could believe otherwise at this point. * "Predictable" here means something like "predictable by other humans, including via reasonably foreseeable technology". If we're in a simulation, the simulator can, by construct, "predict" the whole thing.

njarboe 9y ago
I'm not sure why you think the underlying physics is deterministic. That idea was the state of the art understanding in say the 19th century (billiard balls and Newtonian physics), but quantum mechanics, at the beginning of the 20th century, fundamentally changed the understanding of reality at the lowest level. For a good layman's introduction I would suggest, "QED The Strange Theory of Light and Matter", (1986) by Feynman. Hard ideas but clear prose. I like to read it every few years to remind myself of the fundamentals.
- RandomOpinion 9y ago
  > I'm not sure why you think the underlying physics is deterministic. If conclusive evidence were found that human consciousness is fundamentally dependent on QM processes to function, that would be a Nobel Prize-worthy discovery. Aside from some minor papers exploring the topic, no such evidence has been found AFAIK.
  - njarboe 9y ago
    The functioning of chemistry in individual cells definitely are influenced by quantum effects. Over a short period of time the functioning of the neurons in the human brain will be influenced by QM enough that the billiard ball, clock work, deterministic view of the future unfolding is not correct.
    - haZard_OS 9y ago
      It isn't enough that the processes are affected. The processes must be affected in such a way that the idea of determinism at other scales is compromised. In any event, positing some sort of "QM consciousness" does nothing to save the concept of free will. Where is the "free will" in a fundamentally random phenomenon? Whether one accepts determinism or not, the notion of free will is incoherent.
    - RandomOpinion 9y ago
      > The functioning of chemistry in individual cells definitely are influenced by quantum effects. So? Transistors used in modern computers directly depend on quantum effects (semiconductor physics was an outgrowth of QM) as well, yet we do not need to take into account QM when writing software or designing microprocessors.

_yosefk 9y ago

At my end, I wonder where the author ever saw deterministic computer systems. In my experience, you have to work really, really hard to get even a system computing outputs from inputs without processing any external events in-between to produce deterministic results, with things like floating point hardware and software and parallelism APIs, not to mention your own bugs, working overtime against you - to say nothing of faulty DRAMs and other such delightful phenomena.

839083 9y ago

I'm pretty sure that having to account for segfaults, keyboard interrupts, power outages, and other kinds of 'real world' exceptions that have to be caught means that the code might be deterministic but the computer is exposed to unexpected stimuli. People probably act in a mostly deterministic when there are rules constraining them: sports, board games, social environments, lines. Maybe we are deterministic on a neurotransmitter level. But there's little control over external stimuli.

analyst74 9y ago

People are not 100% deterministic, but evidences also show that expert con man and similarly persuasive people can trigger emotions and thoughts in others reliably.

bobthechef 9y ago
No contradiction between the two. Human beings have natures, habits, character, etc. That fact that, say, depriving people of food will tend to produce hunger does not contradict the idea that we have a measure of freedom in our choices. Of course, a simplistic, mechanistic view of the word will leave no space for anything but blind stuff bumping into other blind stuff, but that picture is wrong.