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John Conway – The Free Will Lectures (2009) [video]
- lez 6y agoI'm very much surprised to hear philosophical gems in this talk. If you like these thoughts, you'll like some of Alan Watts' lectures, too.
- prescojan 6y agoExactly what I was thinking. This kind of attitude can make people that are less connected to the topics John Conway is talking about, feels much more into it.
- dan-robertson 6y agoI’ve heard rumours of a course of five or six lectures Conway did many years ago (before he went to Princeton). The goal is to prove Gödel’s incompleteness theorem but somehow using geometry in some way. I think you need to allow comparing two lines and knowing which is longer (and this foundational thing is hard or maybe impossible) in some sense. I don’t know what is left of eg Gödel numbering or the formal languages stuff because I’ve only heard vague descriptions of this. I believe the contents of this course were lost to time but I’d like to be surprised.
- lidHanteyk 6y agoIt isn't what you're looking for, but perhaps Lawvere's generalization of Gödel's work is sufficiently geometric for you [0][1][2]. [0] https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Lawvere's+fixed+point+theorem https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Lawvere's+fixed+point+theorem [1] http://tac.mta.ca/tac/reprints/articles/15/tr15.pdf http://tac.mta.ca/tac/reprints/articles/15/tr15.pdf [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0305282 https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0305282
- spindle 6y agoI saw Conway talk on Gödel’s incompleteness theorems shortly before he went to Princeton, and the proof he gave was the standard one (although very entertainingly and efficiently presented).
- sysbin 6y agoThe HN crowd from my impression wants to deeply think of themselves as being in control of how their life transpired. I'm an outlier and I think free will is an illusion. Not only do I think everything is fated beyond our control but I have the belief that society would function better if people were educated young about understanding the concept of determinism and why we don't have control over how life transpires. Fundamentally we're living in a judgement & punishment system of society because religion adopted the stance of people being in control instead of what we describe as evil being a product of God. I think a society that replaces judgement & punishment with rehabilitation would be fundamentally just. I'm curious if society will evolve or stay unchanging but I think it likely won't be in my lifetime.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- k__ 6y ago"society would function better if people were educated young about understanding the concept of determinism and why we don't have control" My life got better after I rid myself from those thoughts. I firmly believe, they are dangerous.
- sysbin 6y agoIntelligence is dangerous as well.
- 0_gravitas 6y agoI'd argue per-person ignorance is higher on the scale of "potential to cause humanity harm" than people generally being more intelligent.
- trevyn 6y ago>I firmly believe, they are dangerous. What is your reasoning?
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- coderunner 6y agoMy understanding is that it says if anyone anywhere has free will, then so do some elementary particles. It doesn't say anything about if anyone or if any elementary particles actually have free will right? Does it lend support either way to if free will exists?
- gbjw 6y agoHe notes in the first lecture that he thinks it is impossible to disprove determinism. A determined determinist can always resort to the argument: all of your senses are deceiving you and you are simply experiencing some predetermined script of qualia (he uses the analogy of watching a movie a second time).
- ethn 6y agoThis is also the conclusion of Kant, free will is impossible to prove or disprove as it’s a question of the noumenon.
- gbjw 6y agoRight: if you are a brain-in-a-vat observing some powerful play, what can you say about the world in which the vat is embedded? (or for that matter, how is it that you can even be made aware of the vat’s existence?)
- westoncb 6y agoI think the invulnerable argument for it is even simpler than that: whatever apparently non-determined behavior we observe may only appear that way because we don’t yet know the rules underlying it. Any system will appear unsystematic until the precise rules governing it are known. Since we can’t ever demonstrate that we’ve exhausted all possible theories of a system, the possibility always remains that tomorrow we would discover a perfectly effective one, and from that point the system would be as plainly deterministic as anything else. In other words: we lack the capability to definitively distinguish between our own lacking knowledge and a system’s (potential) intrinsic non-determinism.
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- gbjw 6y agoThe Free Will Theorem paper is available here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0604079v1.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0604079v1.pdf. Most of it seems quite readable.
- JoelJacobson 6y agoPost-corona observation: You can hear a lot of coughing from students in the audience. I wonder if I would have made a mental note of this pre-corona.
- JoelJacobson 6y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPa4nVL09D4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPa4nVL09D4
- harry8 6y agoHow we all wish we were actually post-corona.