3 ms·
Nobody in the simulation you've described would actually make any choices; the choices are predetermined, baked into the heap of the CA/TM being used to drive t
by myWindoonn 6y ago
Nobody in the simulation you've described would actually make any choices; the choices are predetermined, baked into the heap of the CA/TM being used to drive the computation. Conway's Free Will concerns situations where the choices cannot be predetermined, as a consequence of the Kochen-Specker lemma.
- heisenzombie 6y agoYes, I think the parent would accept that the automata in the simulation do not have free will of the "Conway" type. I believe he is saying the agents have free will of the "compatibilist" type. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/
- chr1 6y agoSituations where the choices cannot be predetermined, are not free will, they are just randomness, because they do not depend on the one making the choice. That said, knowing that the choice is predetermined and knowing the choice, is often very different. For simple systems if you know the initial state you can easily predict all the future states by using a formula and not doing the computation the system performs. But for many systems like rule 30, the only way to predict the future state is to perform exactly the computation the system is performing. So if the TM describes a person, the only way to know future states of the TM from initial state is to wait for the person in the TM to make the choice. In Conways example, free will would be if experimenters decision what to measure is based on the state of the part of the universe describing the experimenter alone, and not connected to the parts describing other experimenters performing related measurement.