3 ms·

Well, if I take a Mercedes apart, nowhere in any part of the car will I find the ability to comfortably cruise at 160 km/h on the autobahn. Not in the engine (i

Well, if I take a Mercedes apart, nowhere in any part of the car will I find the ability to comfortably cruise at 160 km/h on the autobahn. Not in the engine (it just makes funny noises), not in the suspension (it's just a bit springy when compressed) , and not in the tires (which just bounce up and down and roll off if you throw them). Only when I put all the parts of the car together in the right order and in the right places does that property emerge.

Workaccount2 3y ago
...which is an entirely deterministic output of the design of the car. Literally the reason why the car was made the way it was. I'm failing to see your point here, but it seems you are alluding to the idea that chaos theory produces a black box of complexity, and therefore free will exists there. Which isn't really an explanation so much as an exercise in moving goal posts into unlit corridors of knowledge. Which doesn't even make sense because chaos theory is a theory that deals with system evolution when incomplete knowledge is known about the systems starting conditions. No where in chaos theory is there talk of supernatural phenomena. It's purely a theory of practical constraints, no physical ones.
- Kim_Bruning 3y ago
  The Mercedes example is just strictly in response to the idea that property X of a system must somehow (already) be present in one of its sub-components. It doesn't. So a concept like free will could exhibit itself in the output of -say- a turing machine, (or turing-like entity, like a DNA strand - think tape and multiple read heads), even if none of the components has that property. I do actually think that certain [deterministically] chaotic systems have a lot of the properties we associate with free will (the ability to make some sort of sensible choices that still seem 'random'); so I tend to see them as very similar concepts. You might have a different definition though!

Workaccount2 3y ago

...which is an entirely deterministic output of the design of the car. Literally the reason why the car was made the way it was. I'm failing to see your point here, but it seems you are alluding to the idea that chaos theory produces a black box of complexity, and therefore free will exists there. Which isn't really an explanation so much as an exercise in moving goal posts into unlit corridors of knowledge. Which doesn't even make sense because chaos theory is a theory that deals with system evolution when incomplete knowledge is known about the systems starting conditions. No where in chaos theory is there talk of supernatural phenomena. It's purely a theory of practical constraints, no physical ones.

Kim_Bruning 3y ago
The Mercedes example is just strictly in response to the idea that property X of a system must somehow (already) be present in one of its sub-components. It doesn't. So a concept like free will could exhibit itself in the output of -say- a turing machine, (or turing-like entity, like a DNA strand - think tape and multiple read heads), even if none of the components has that property. I do actually think that certain [deterministically] chaotic systems have a lot of the properties we associate with free will (the ability to make some sort of sensible choices that still seem 'random'); so I tend to see them as very similar concepts. You might have a different definition though!