3 ms·
> Vs. the reality is that the the whole process is just as deterministic and conscious-free as water flowing downhill. And you think you're so different? Do yo
by Wowfunhappy 4y ago
> Vs. the reality is that the the whole process is just as deterministic and conscious-free as water flowing downhill.
And you think you're so different? Do you have free will? Are you sure you're not just following a deterministic process?
- Ensorceled 4y agoAre you really saying that black holes ARE as deterministic as humans or even wolves?
- bell-cot 4y agoWhich sort of "free will"? If the boring sort, that wanna-be alphas argue endlessly about in Philosophy 507, then "no". If the sort that real people need to have a sense of, to cope with life in the real world, then "yes". Given ~40 bytes of data about a black hole, its behavior can be predicted, exactly enough for ~all real-world purposes, and for millions of years into the future, by a pretty simple program running on a (say) old Z80 CPU. You can drop a billion empty beer cans into it, one by one, and if you match their trajectories then the outcomes will be ~identical. Humans, or even my sister's stupid pet dog, are nothing remotely resembling that predictable and deterministic.
- dotancohen 4y agoI really like the idea of quantifying how deterministic a system is by the amount of data need to accurately (for reasonable values of accuracy) predict it's behavior. Objectional tests are terrific for bringing philosophers back into the realm of reason.
- bell-cot 4y agosed -I 's/are terrific for bringing philosophers back into/are a reasonable tactic for attempting to drag screaming, kicking, & biting philosophers back into/'