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I just can't square the mechanistic view of the world with the idea that we have any agency. The compatibilists just seemed to define things in a way that it lo

by klik99 5y ago

I just can't square the mechanistic view of the world with the idea that we have any agency. The compatibilists just seemed to define things in a way that it logically checks out. Certainly I FEEL like I have agency, and if I didn't some self-destruct circuit would fire in my head. That's certainly an incentive to prove it. When I was a child I thought "This is the way the world is, always has been and always will be", then as an adult I think "This system is what governs change, always have and always will,". If reality is goverened by a mathematical structure, then there are a set of rules where it is no longer a simplified abstraction and there is no error term. Either A) there is a mathematical structure and we will iterate until we find it (or it is fundamentally unknowable, thanks Godel!) or B) our brains are evolved pattern recognizers, and we deem what is repeatable as "useful" and ignore the parts that don't repeat, building a world view based on logic that certainly exists locally but isn't the fundamental fabric of reality. Something like "free will" could only fit into scenario B. One attempted solution I've heard is the idea that we are all co-creating reality, and what really happens is the mathematically constrained union of all consciousness wills. But if the world was truly a mathematical system, then results can't teeter between alternatives like a ball on the top of a triangle roof. Any idea of free will implies there is SOMETHING that is indeterministic, and as we understand the world at a smaller and smaller level, our definitions of free will just push that indeterminism smaller and smaller. But it remains. I don't think Buddhism denies the local existence of constraints, just as it doesn't deny the local existence of an orange or banana. But are those constraints truly fundamental or just as impermanent as decaying fruit (but on the scale of aeons instead of days)? "Emptiness" in the Buddhist sense doesn't mean things don't exist, or that things are arbitrary, or there is or isn't free will. To say things are arbitrary implies the existence of meaning. I like to translate the Buddhist "Mu" as "N/A". Disclaimer: there are so many types of Buddhism and my a la carte version of it suffers from the no true scotsman fallacy. Sorry for saying the same thing in multiple ways. Personally I don't think any of this matters when it comes to doing the right thing day by day, but it's an interesting game to play. Someone reading this is thinking I'm one of the folks ruining Hacker News.

FeepingCreature 5y ago
> If reality is goverened by a mathematical structure, then there are a set of rules where it is no longer a simplified abstraction and there is no error term. Either A) there is a mathematical structure and we will iterate until we find it (or it is fundamentally unknowable, thanks Godel!) or B) our brains are evolved pattern recognizers, and we deem what is repeatable as "useful" and ignore the parts that don't repeat, building a world view based on logic that certainly exists locally but isn't the fundamental fabric of reality. Something like "free will" could only fit into scenario B. I think that agentic, practical free will is entirely compatible with "A", and in fact relies on determinism for its operation. I think the common mistake that people make is that they think that the fact that only one outcome exists in the physical layer means that only one reality can exist in their decisionmaking. But the future worlds you evaluate as part of the process of making a decision are fundamentally a different kind of thing from the physically real world your decision actually plays out in - not in the sense that they're spiritual, or metaphysical, but in the sense that they're fictional constructs. There is a philosophical difficulty here in that, when you evaluate possible worlds, it must be the case that, because you will only actually make one choice, the yous in all but one of the choices seem like they are being logically inconsistent.¹ That is, all but one of those futures are not just not real, but internally incoherent, in that the you in them made a choice that, as you will soon discover, they did not actually make. To resolve this, it is again important to firmly keep in mind that these worlds are not real, and the you in them is not real, and you can just say "in this imagined world, I made this decision because it is imaginary, and I (on the real level) am using this world to evaluate the outcomes of a choice." So there is no contradiction after all. In summary: assuming that in reality only one outcome exists, your ability to simulate fictional outcomes to process the consequences of your decisions is unimpeded. That is what deciding is. That's all it ever was. ¹ A surprisingly hard-to-fix failure mode for decision theories goes like this: "Consider the possibility that I decide to do A. Looking at that future world, we can know that the output of my decision theory was A, thus proving that A is the best choice. Therefore, I should do A." Imo the correct fix is making the agent aware that this is a fictional world being evaluated by means of assuming A. So the conclusion that A is the best choice does not follow.
- klik99 5y ago
qwerty456127 5y ago
> Someone reading this is thinking I'm one of the folks ruining Hacker News. And someone other thinks you are adding juice to it. To me sufficiently rational, open-minded and easy-worded (the combination hard to find elsewhere) discussions of how does the human mind/body/world/whatever work and how to possibly hack that seem way more interesting than how does yet another web service or JavaScript library does.
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  Occasionally the mind would even spit out a very wrong word which just has some phonetic similarity. E.g. I recently said "let's go to Wikipedia" instead of "... to Ikea". That was funny.

by klik99 5y ago

FeepingCreature 5y ago

> If reality is goverened by a mathematical structure, then there are a set of rules where it is no longer a simplified abstraction and there is no error term. Either A) there is a mathematical structure and we will iterate until we find it (or it is fundamentally unknowable, thanks Godel!) or B) our brains are evolved pattern recognizers, and we deem what is repeatable as "useful" and ignore the parts that don't repeat, building a world view based on logic that certainly exists locally but isn't the fundamental fabric of reality. Something like "free will" could only fit into scenario B. I think that agentic, practical free will is entirely compatible with "A", and in fact relies on determinism for its operation. I think the common mistake that people make is that they think that the fact that only one outcome exists in the physical layer means that only one reality can exist in their decisionmaking. But the future worlds you evaluate as part of the process of making a decision are fundamentally a different kind of thing from the physically real world your decision actually plays out in - not in the sense that they're spiritual, or metaphysical, but in the sense that they're fictional constructs. There is a philosophical difficulty here in that, when you evaluate possible worlds, it must be the case that, because you will only actually make one choice, the yous in all but one of the choices seem like they are being logically inconsistent.¹ That is, all but one of those futures are not just not real, but internally incoherent, in that the you in them made a choice that, as you will soon discover, they did not actually make. To resolve this, it is again important to firmly keep in mind that these worlds are not real, and the you in them is not real, and you can just say "in this imagined world, I made this decision because it is imaginary, and I (on the real level) am using this world to evaluate the outcomes of a choice." So there is no contradiction after all. In summary: assuming that in reality only one outcome exists, your ability to simulate fictional outcomes to process the consequences of your decisions is unimpeded. That is what deciding is. That's all it ever was. ¹ A surprisingly hard-to-fix failure mode for decision theories goes like this: "Consider the possibility that I decide to do A. Looking at that future world, we can know that the output of my decision theory was A, thus proving that A is the best choice. Therefore, I should do A." Imo the correct fix is making the agent aware that this is a fictional world being evaluated by means of assuming A. So the conclusion that A is the best choice does not follow.

klik99 5y ago

qwerty456127 5y ago

> Someone reading this is thinking I'm one of the folks ruining Hacker News. And someone other thinks you are adding juice to it. To me sufficiently rational, open-minded and easy-worded (the combination hard to find elsewhere) discussions of how does the human mind/body/world/whatever work and how to possibly hack that seem way more interesting than how does yet another web service or JavaScript library does.

qwerty456127 5y ago
Occasionally the mind would even spit out a very wrong word which just has some phonetic similarity. E.g. I recently said "let's go to Wikipedia" instead of "... to Ikea". That was funny.