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My (religious, spiritual, please-don’t-downvote-because-of-hate) opinion is the aspect of free will which extends even to the lowest creatures means computers w

My (religious, spiritual, please-don’t-downvote-because-of-hate) opinion is the aspect of free will which extends even to the lowest creatures means computers will never simulate them accurately

h0l0cube 2y ago
No downvotes from me, but where do you think the free will lives? What mechanism produces it? What about that mechanism, if not purely stochastic, is not predictable? If free will can have a real measurable physical effect on this universe, then why can't it be isolated?
- khimaros 2y ago
  a random number generator in base reality? ;) really i'm just using this as a more accessible (to rational materialists) example of how processes can exist outside of our measurable physical reality.
  - h0l0cube 2y ago
    > processes can exist outside of our measurable physical reality If it can't be measured in reality, how can it be relevant to reality? > a random number generator in base reality? How does randomness pertain to free will?
    - khimaros 2y ago
      they may have measurable effects in our physical reality, eg. the behavior of the individual and even be correlated with other physical processes. however, there may be hidden variables outside of our physical reality that are actually mechanizing the result. some such processes may be non-deterministic, which is why i used randomness as an example. what i'm implying is analogous but opposite to the concept of a philosophical zombie. there may be a ghost in the machine which no measurement can reveal.
      - h0l0cube 2y ago
        P-zombies, conceptually, actually have no ghost in the machine, but are indistinguishable from sentient beings. Sentience and free will are two different things. > they may have measurable effects in our physical reality If there’s something external that interfaces with the physical universe, such an externality could be observed. It’s strange that we haven’t found such a force. But if it were to exist, in some parallel universe, that external force would have its own mechanics and its own chain of causality – its own physics so to speak. Dualism doesn’t get you to free will, it just means there’s physics we can’t observe. (Or perhaps there’s some superset universe that interfaces with that universe, and then it’s still determinism or stochastic processes all the way down.)
- sufehmi 2y ago
  In some kind of quantum space probably. We still don't know so much, yet we claim so much.
  - GoblinSlayer 2y ago
    If you want randomness, why not flip a coin? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twoface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twoface
  - idiotsecant 2y ago
    Yes, for example we make wild claims like 'biological sentience is incomputable'
    - nipah 2y ago
      Or that it is, like most people working in projects like those believe without first proving.
  - h0l0cube 2y ago
    Even quantum space can be described by both deterministic and stochastic elements. The stochastic elements of quantum uncertainty are about as much free will as a PRNG – though even more predictable as they don't have a flat statistical distribution. And there are also known exploitable and predictable mechanisms behind quantum mechanics (emphasis added), so much so, that they can be leveraged for computation. I think when most people say free will they mean dualism, in that there's some sentience in the spiritual plane that directs their bodies in the physical plane. But if this spiritual plane has no observable effect on the physical plane, it's completely incompatible with free will. And if it is observable, then it is indeed a measurable part of physical reality, but yet we haven't measured it - not even stochastic effects (which can still be observed statistically). Sabine Hossenfelder has a much better informed take on this, and it's worth a watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI5FMj5D9zU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI5FMj5D9zU Also of interest, a study where fMRI readings were used to predict a persons decisions well in advance of them executing the decision. The success rate was only 60%, but still better than chance, and this study was way back in 2008: > fMRI machine learning of brain activity (multivariate pattern analysis) has been used to predict the user choice of a button (left/right) up to 7 seconds before their reported will of having done so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#Neuronal_prediction_of_free_will https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#Neur...
- monero-xmr 2y ago
  I believe our consciousness is separate from our physical body. This metaphysical line of thinking is embodied by “idealism” which is opposed to “physicalism” or materialism. I am also not a determinist and I don’t believe you can replay the universe from first principles and get the exact same timeline. I’m also religious and I believe in God (and the Holy Trinity) in the core of my being.
jxjnskkzxxhx 2y ago
Interesting. This kind of dont-understand-therefore-fill-in-the-gaps-with-magic is the same mental shortcut that would lead you to believe that cryptocurrency is a good thing.
- vixen99 2y ago
  Well of course Shakespeare got it wrong with ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’. At least, that's seems to be the acceptably prevalent view.
  - card_zero 2y ago
    That was Hamlet, wanting to believe in ghosts, so that his dead dad could reveal that he'd been poisoned in the ear, for the purpose of the plot. So yeah, in the original context it was some paranormal investigator or Scooby Doo level of crap. But subsequently people have picked it up and made it deep and meaningful due to having been wrote by The Bard. Even so, what do we want it to mean? That just about anything could maybe be discovered one day, therefore we can imagine arbitrary things right now and say they're real? Doesn't follow.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- monero-xmr 2y ago
  My primary reason I like cryptocurrency is it takes money out of the hands of government, which is run by people and is therefore fallible
  - alpaca128 2y ago
    Every component of cryptocurrencies, every crypto exchange etc is created and run by fallible people as well. And as could be seen with the FTX debacle the outcome was basically the same but without helpful government regulations.
    - 2y ago
rocqua 2y ago
Does that mean you believe there is something beyond the physical realm that gives free will? Otherwise, it seems to me like another physical process should be able to simulate a creature. There is still the general fact that plenty of processes are 'chaotic' making them impossible to accurately simulate (because errors in the initial state compound exponentially). But it seems to me like a good enough simulation of a chaotic system is phenemologically indistinguishable from the real thing.
GoblinSlayer 2y ago
Nature being continuous is exactly the reason why our universe is not a simulation.
- aswegs8 2y ago
  Quantum mechanics teaches us nature isn't continuous though.
  - wcoenen 2y ago
    The energy levels of electrons bound to atoms/molecules are quantized, and therefore the energy levels of photons emitted/absorbed (when those electrons change energy levels) are quantized. But as far as I understand that is just the result of constraints imposed by the atom/molecule "box". Like how a guitar string can only vibrate at certain frequencies because an integer multiple of wavelengths of the standing wave must fit on the string. Outside of such systems, energy levels are not quantized. For example, photons from distant galaxies appear to be redshifted on a continuous spectrum.
    - d_tr 2y ago
      And even within the box the energy levels can be varied continuously if, for example, you squeeze the molecule or put it in an electric field.
- viraptor 2y ago
  Has this been actually proven? I remember multiple experiments trying to prove the opposite - both effectively a discrete-like and a grid-like universe. Wolfram for example has some ideas about discrete graphs https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-have-a-path-to-the-fundamental-theory-of-physics-and-its-beautiful/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-h...
  - d_tr 2y ago
    > Has this been actually proven? Neither proven nor disproven in any capacity. Also I have no clue how anyone could assert that the universe being "continuous" (whatever that means) could be casually claimed by anyone to have any link to our universe being "a simulation" (whatever that means) or not.
nkrisc 2y ago
And my magical belief is there is no free will so that means you’re wrong, right? Both are silly statements that can’t add anything.
- h0l0cube 2y ago
  I sympathize with your point of view, but they stated opinion based on faith, which is wholly (holy?) different from stating truth
danwills 2y ago
No hate from me! You can believe what you like but I do disagree I'm afraid. I think any rule-following (ie ~computational) system is either below, or at the same level of dynamic complexity as all others. I also think that it's truly impossible to draw a sharp line between alive and not-alive, so the idea of 'free will' would have to extend all the way down to the smallest things like atoms/quarks/space etc. Is it really meaningful to suggest that it could be anything like 'free will' at that size? Sure some quantum stuff seems indeterminate but could be fed by something that looks random to us - it might not actually be (dunno!?), but the idea that things at a larger scale could be meaningfully controlled by feeding-in different values (that still somehow have to look perfectly random!) seems extremely far-fetched to me. Larger things like a molecule, a transistor or a human! generally stay as coherent and predictable/controllable (or self-controlling) things, even in the face of indeterminate-ness at the smallest scales underneath. I just can't see how there's any utility in connecting the idea of free-will/consciousness to this indeterminacy.. it's like saying free will is just fuzziness, and how does that really help in understanding life, the universe and everything?
- mromanuk 2y ago
  isn't free will, more about inner control, in opposition to external control?
  - danwills 2y ago
    What a great, thought-provoking question! Thanks mromanuk! I started reading the Wikipedia page about free-will to try to work out where I stand on this. I think I quite like the classical way of thinking about free will as simply: Being free from coercion in one's decision-making! I guess the source of such limits could be either internal or external or both though! So I don't know whether that helps much in answering your question. The Wikipedia page says about 'compatibilism' (which holds that free will and determinism are compatible) that it is "the absence of various impediments" and that "a coerced agent's choices can still be free if such coercion coincides with the agent's personal intentions and desires", so that still doesn't really help answer the question. I accept quantum-mechanics enough to be slightly skeptical of strict-determinism, so I guess maybe I fall more into the 'metaphysical libertarianism' point of view, but I still feel like the non-determinism that QM introduces probably acts more like a limit to how 'free' free-will can possibly be, rather than being a kind of 'secret sauce' that makes it possible for us or some external factor to be able to meddle with what reality (or ourselves) get up to in a meaningful way. I also think that the internal/external distinction breaks down when examined very closely. For me this leads to the idea that I am actually the same thing (same 'wavefront' or whatnot?) as what caused the existence of the universe that I am a part of. I am both myself and the environment at the same time, but with a limited ability to sense very far into the external universe and its workings, beyond input from senses like sight/hearing/etc (I guess realms of pure-thought should also be included too though! Do we 'sense' reason/philosophy/mathematics/algorithms when we think about them?). I think one answer (or the avoidance of a clear answer) to your question is that people have been arguing about this for thousands of years, and we (as a collective/species) are still really not very close to being firmly decided about it at all!
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
atemerev 2y ago
My (similarly religious) opinion is that because we _can_ simulate biological systems, computers can and will have free will too. Human brain is just a physical object that has some particular structure. We have free will (yes, I believe in free will). Then, we are not special, there can be other systems with free will, and we can build them.
- h0l0cube 2y ago
  > computers can and will have free will too What is free will if it's simply causation? i.e., environmental inputs leading to differences in charge, altering other differences in charge, leading to outputs, leading to environmental outputs, leading to changed environmental inputs, etc. If the chain can be examined and is entirely deterministic, be it neuronal or silicon circuits, where's the escape hatch? Another thought experiment: if there's something that is you, that decides, and presented two different realities where the environment, brain, etc. were precisely the same, what would cause there to be a difference in decision? If it's deterministic, how is that free will? If it's random, how is that free will?
  - atemerev 2y ago
    Physics is famously non-deterministic. Quantum physics is built on irreducible randomness, it is incompatible with determinism (except for evolutions of probability quasidistributions). And we don't even need to try to find "quantum interactions" in human brain — every physical system is quantum, for every photon that touches retina. There's enough indeterminism to hide entire universes. Free will is the interplay between determinism and randomness, an emergent phenomenon with multiple self-recursive feedback loops and path dependence. Even if we could trace it through all these loops and find all the mixtures of quantum randomness and classical deterministic patterns it emerges from, it wouldn't make it any less magical.
    - michaelmrose 2y ago
      Aren't we just saying that matter is complex enough to form an input to a model of the world and self which results in a really complex feedback loop where organisms which adjusted actions to increasingly complex projected model state had more descendants? The self is just the only part of the model directly wired to our neurons and self awareness is just correct labeling. In that context will is certainly a function of a how much a things internal model of self encoding the idea that its actions are moreso based on its own model than the tgings its model is built with and ability to make this distinction right or wrong and free will is basically meaningless. Its certainly not a magical out for determinism all the qualities that we imbue with such meaning are as based on the same principals as anything else.
GuB-42 2y ago
There are many things that we don't consider to have free will that is very hard to simulate accurately. Like the weather, and generally any chaotic system. We can't even simulate interactions between small molecules accurately. I don't consider free will to be a scientific concept. It is philosophical, or religious. But if we give free will to things we can't simulate accurately, maybe planets like the Earth have free will. It is a common religious belief, and if you believe that simple life forms have free will, not too far fetched. The Earth, with its atmosphere, magnetism and geology is a really complex system we have a hard time understanding.
leptons 2y ago
IMHO "free will" is about motivation, the drive to survive which is inherent to all life. And I don't think we have as much free will as we might think we do - if you've ever seriously starved, you'd maybe understand "free will" a little bit more, and how you aren't really free from your mortal coil at all. Motivation is all a computer is really lacking to have free will. Computers are good at following instructions, but they aren't good at surviving yet since we can just cut their power. God forbid someone like Elon Musk teaches a computer to have real motivation and not just follow instructions. I do think "a computer" in the far distant future could simulate every atomic interaction sufficiently to simulate a living organism, but we are nowhere near that yet. A virtual organism of this type would still be a blank slate and need to learn what free will is to really have any beyond satisfying whatever need it has to survive. Do newborn babies have free will, or are they operating on the instinct coded into their DNA? I subscribe to the latter, because science is my religion.
- michaelmrose 2y ago
  Musk is an idiot who hires people a lot smarter than him. Every company he has he bought and succeeds only to the extent that he leaves it alone.
sitkack 2y ago
Life is already an analog computer running on hardware (the universe). You could be correct that if life is using the hardware to the fullest extent, simulating it again would you a horrendous double virtualization penalty. We could already be living under that same double virt penalty. I think we have an outsized focus on free will, partly because free will is a trick played on us by evolution. It takes an exorbitant amount of effort to exercise anything close to what most people would consider free will and the phase lag is measured in hours if not years.
brookst 2y ago
I’m curious if you think plants, single-cell algae, or single-cell animals like amoebas will be simulatable?
- monero-xmr 2y ago
  But simulate-able how? Not like they would exist in reality, interacting with the rest of the universe
  - brookst 2y ago
    Why not? Most simulations (flight sims, etc) include external stimulus.
    - monero-xmr 2y ago
      The universe cannot be simulated accurately

My (religious, spiritual, please-don’t-downvote-because-of-hate) opinion is the aspect of free will which extends even to the lowest creatures means computers will never simulate them accurately

h0l0cube 2y ago

No downvotes from me, but where do you think the free will lives? What mechanism produces it? What about that mechanism, if not purely stochastic, is not predictable? If free will can have a real measurable physical effect on this universe, then why can't it be isolated?

khimaros 2y ago
a random number generator in base reality? ;) really i'm just using this as a more accessible (to rational materialists) example of how processes can exist outside of our measurable physical reality.
- h0l0cube 2y ago
  > processes can exist outside of our measurable physical reality If it can't be measured in reality, how can it be relevant to reality? > a random number generator in base reality? How does randomness pertain to free will?
  - khimaros 2y ago
    they may have measurable effects in our physical reality, eg. the behavior of the individual and even be correlated with other physical processes. however, there may be hidden variables outside of our physical reality that are actually mechanizing the result. some such processes may be non-deterministic, which is why i used randomness as an example. what i'm implying is analogous but opposite to the concept of a philosophical zombie. there may be a ghost in the machine which no measurement can reveal.
    - h0l0cube 2y ago
      P-zombies, conceptually, actually have no ghost in the machine, but are indistinguishable from sentient beings. Sentience and free will are two different things. > they may have measurable effects in our physical reality If there’s something external that interfaces with the physical universe, such an externality could be observed. It’s strange that we haven’t found such a force. But if it were to exist, in some parallel universe, that external force would have its own mechanics and its own chain of causality – its own physics so to speak. Dualism doesn’t get you to free will, it just means there’s physics we can’t observe. (Or perhaps there’s some superset universe that interfaces with that universe, and then it’s still determinism or stochastic processes all the way down.)
sufehmi 2y ago
In some kind of quantum space probably. We still don't know so much, yet we claim so much.
- GoblinSlayer 2y ago
  If you want randomness, why not flip a coin? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twoface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twoface
- idiotsecant 2y ago
  Yes, for example we make wild claims like 'biological sentience is incomputable'
  - nipah 2y ago
    Or that it is, like most people working in projects like those believe without first proving.
- h0l0cube 2y ago
  Even quantum space can be described by both deterministic and stochastic elements. The stochastic elements of quantum uncertainty are about as much free will as a PRNG – though even more predictable as they don't have a flat statistical distribution. And there are also known exploitable and predictable mechanisms behind quantum mechanics (emphasis added), so much so, that they can be leveraged for computation. I think when most people say free will they mean dualism, in that there's some sentience in the spiritual plane that directs their bodies in the physical plane. But if this spiritual plane has no observable effect on the physical plane, it's completely incompatible with free will. And if it is observable, then it is indeed a measurable part of physical reality, but yet we haven't measured it - not even stochastic effects (which can still be observed statistically). Sabine Hossenfelder has a much better informed take on this, and it's worth a watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI5FMj5D9zU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI5FMj5D9zU Also of interest, a study where fMRI readings were used to predict a persons decisions well in advance of them executing the decision. The success rate was only 60%, but still better than chance, and this study was way back in 2008: > fMRI machine learning of brain activity (multivariate pattern analysis) has been used to predict the user choice of a button (left/right) up to 7 seconds before their reported will of having done so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#Neuronal_prediction_of_free_will https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#Neur...
monero-xmr 2y ago
I believe our consciousness is separate from our physical body. This metaphysical line of thinking is embodied by “idealism” which is opposed to “physicalism” or materialism. I am also not a determinist and I don’t believe you can replay the universe from first principles and get the exact same timeline. I’m also religious and I believe in God (and the Holy Trinity) in the core of my being.

jxjnskkzxxhx 2y ago

Interesting. This kind of dont-understand-therefore-fill-in-the-gaps-with-magic is the same mental shortcut that would lead you to believe that cryptocurrency is a good thing.

vixen99 2y ago
Well of course Shakespeare got it wrong with ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’. At least, that's seems to be the acceptably prevalent view.
- card_zero 2y ago
  That was Hamlet, wanting to believe in ghosts, so that his dead dad could reveal that he'd been poisoned in the ear, for the purpose of the plot. So yeah, in the original context it was some paranormal investigator or Scooby Doo level of crap. But subsequently people have picked it up and made it deep and meaningful due to having been wrote by The Bard. Even so, what do we want it to mean? That just about anything could maybe be discovered one day, therefore we can imagine arbitrary things right now and say they're real? Doesn't follow.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
monero-xmr 2y ago
My primary reason I like cryptocurrency is it takes money out of the hands of government, which is run by people and is therefore fallible
- alpaca128 2y ago
  Every component of cryptocurrencies, every crypto exchange etc is created and run by fallible people as well. And as could be seen with the FTX debacle the outcome was basically the same but without helpful government regulations.
  - 2y ago

rocqua 2y ago

Does that mean you believe there is something beyond the physical realm that gives free will? Otherwise, it seems to me like another physical process should be able to simulate a creature. There is still the general fact that plenty of processes are 'chaotic' making them impossible to accurately simulate (because errors in the initial state compound exponentially). But it seems to me like a good enough simulation of a chaotic system is phenemologically indistinguishable from the real thing.

GoblinSlayer 2y ago

Nature being continuous is exactly the reason why our universe is not a simulation.

aswegs8 2y ago
Quantum mechanics teaches us nature isn't continuous though.
- wcoenen 2y ago
  The energy levels of electrons bound to atoms/molecules are quantized, and therefore the energy levels of photons emitted/absorbed (when those electrons change energy levels) are quantized. But as far as I understand that is just the result of constraints imposed by the atom/molecule "box". Like how a guitar string can only vibrate at certain frequencies because an integer multiple of wavelengths of the standing wave must fit on the string. Outside of such systems, energy levels are not quantized. For example, photons from distant galaxies appear to be redshifted on a continuous spectrum.
  - d_tr 2y ago
    And even within the box the energy levels can be varied continuously if, for example, you squeeze the molecule or put it in an electric field.
viraptor 2y ago
Has this been actually proven? I remember multiple experiments trying to prove the opposite - both effectively a discrete-like and a grid-like universe. Wolfram for example has some ideas about discrete graphs https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-have-a-path-to-the-fundamental-theory-of-physics-and-its-beautiful/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-h...
- d_tr 2y ago
  > Has this been actually proven? Neither proven nor disproven in any capacity. Also I have no clue how anyone could assert that the universe being "continuous" (whatever that means) could be casually claimed by anyone to have any link to our universe being "a simulation" (whatever that means) or not.

nkrisc 2y ago

And my magical belief is there is no free will so that means you’re wrong, right? Both are silly statements that can’t add anything.

h0l0cube 2y ago
I sympathize with your point of view, but they stated opinion based on faith, which is wholly (holy?) different from stating truth

danwills 2y ago

No hate from me! You can believe what you like but I do disagree I'm afraid. I think any rule-following (ie ~computational) system is either below, or at the same level of dynamic complexity as all others. I also think that it's truly impossible to draw a sharp line between alive and not-alive, so the idea of 'free will' would have to extend all the way down to the smallest things like atoms/quarks/space etc. Is it really meaningful to suggest that it could be anything like 'free will' at that size? Sure some quantum stuff seems indeterminate but could be fed by something that looks random to us - it might not actually be (dunno!?), but the idea that things at a larger scale could be meaningfully controlled by feeding-in different values (that still somehow have to look perfectly random!) seems extremely far-fetched to me. Larger things like a molecule, a transistor or a human! generally stay as coherent and predictable/controllable (or self-controlling) things, even in the face of indeterminate-ness at the smallest scales underneath. I just can't see how there's any utility in connecting the idea of free-will/consciousness to this indeterminacy.. it's like saying free will is just fuzziness, and how does that really help in understanding life, the universe and everything?

mromanuk 2y ago
isn't free will, more about inner control, in opposition to external control?
- danwills 2y ago
  What a great, thought-provoking question! Thanks mromanuk! I started reading the Wikipedia page about free-will to try to work out where I stand on this. I think I quite like the classical way of thinking about free will as simply: Being free from coercion in one's decision-making! I guess the source of such limits could be either internal or external or both though! So I don't know whether that helps much in answering your question. The Wikipedia page says about 'compatibilism' (which holds that free will and determinism are compatible) that it is "the absence of various impediments" and that "a coerced agent's choices can still be free if such coercion coincides with the agent's personal intentions and desires", so that still doesn't really help answer the question. I accept quantum-mechanics enough to be slightly skeptical of strict-determinism, so I guess maybe I fall more into the 'metaphysical libertarianism' point of view, but I still feel like the non-determinism that QM introduces probably acts more like a limit to how 'free' free-will can possibly be, rather than being a kind of 'secret sauce' that makes it possible for us or some external factor to be able to meddle with what reality (or ourselves) get up to in a meaningful way. I also think that the internal/external distinction breaks down when examined very closely. For me this leads to the idea that I am actually the same thing (same 'wavefront' or whatnot?) as what caused the existence of the universe that I am a part of. I am both myself and the environment at the same time, but with a limited ability to sense very far into the external universe and its workings, beyond input from senses like sight/hearing/etc (I guess realms of pure-thought should also be included too though! Do we 'sense' reason/philosophy/mathematics/algorithms when we think about them?). I think one answer (or the avoidance of a clear answer) to your question is that people have been arguing about this for thousands of years, and we (as a collective/species) are still really not very close to being firmly decided about it at all!

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

atemerev 2y ago

My (similarly religious) opinion is that because we _can_ simulate biological systems, computers can and will have free will too. Human brain is just a physical object that has some particular structure. We have free will (yes, I believe in free will). Then, we are not special, there can be other systems with free will, and we can build them.

h0l0cube 2y ago
> computers can and will have free will too What is free will if it's simply causation? i.e., environmental inputs leading to differences in charge, altering other differences in charge, leading to outputs, leading to environmental outputs, leading to changed environmental inputs, etc. If the chain can be examined and is entirely deterministic, be it neuronal or silicon circuits, where's the escape hatch? Another thought experiment: if there's something that is you, that decides, and presented two different realities where the environment, brain, etc. were precisely the same, what would cause there to be a difference in decision? If it's deterministic, how is that free will? If it's random, how is that free will?
- atemerev 2y ago
  Physics is famously non-deterministic. Quantum physics is built on irreducible randomness, it is incompatible with determinism (except for evolutions of probability quasidistributions). And we don't even need to try to find "quantum interactions" in human brain — every physical system is quantum, for every photon that touches retina. There's enough indeterminism to hide entire universes. Free will is the interplay between determinism and randomness, an emergent phenomenon with multiple self-recursive feedback loops and path dependence. Even if we could trace it through all these loops and find all the mixtures of quantum randomness and classical deterministic patterns it emerges from, it wouldn't make it any less magical.
  - michaelmrose 2y ago
    Aren't we just saying that matter is complex enough to form an input to a model of the world and self which results in a really complex feedback loop where organisms which adjusted actions to increasingly complex projected model state had more descendants? The self is just the only part of the model directly wired to our neurons and self awareness is just correct labeling. In that context will is certainly a function of a how much a things internal model of self encoding the idea that its actions are moreso based on its own model than the tgings its model is built with and ability to make this distinction right or wrong and free will is basically meaningless. Its certainly not a magical out for determinism all the qualities that we imbue with such meaning are as based on the same principals as anything else.

GuB-42 2y ago

There are many things that we don't consider to have free will that is very hard to simulate accurately. Like the weather, and generally any chaotic system. We can't even simulate interactions between small molecules accurately. I don't consider free will to be a scientific concept. It is philosophical, or religious. But if we give free will to things we can't simulate accurately, maybe planets like the Earth have free will. It is a common religious belief, and if you believe that simple life forms have free will, not too far fetched. The Earth, with its atmosphere, magnetism and geology is a really complex system we have a hard time understanding.

leptons 2y ago

IMHO "free will" is about motivation, the drive to survive which is inherent to all life. And I don't think we have as much free will as we might think we do - if you've ever seriously starved, you'd maybe understand "free will" a little bit more, and how you aren't really free from your mortal coil at all. Motivation is all a computer is really lacking to have free will. Computers are good at following instructions, but they aren't good at surviving yet since we can just cut their power. God forbid someone like Elon Musk teaches a computer to have real motivation and not just follow instructions. I do think "a computer" in the far distant future could simulate every atomic interaction sufficiently to simulate a living organism, but we are nowhere near that yet. A virtual organism of this type would still be a blank slate and need to learn what free will is to really have any beyond satisfying whatever need it has to survive. Do newborn babies have free will, or are they operating on the instinct coded into their DNA? I subscribe to the latter, because science is my religion.

michaelmrose 2y ago
Musk is an idiot who hires people a lot smarter than him. Every company he has he bought and succeeds only to the extent that he leaves it alone.

sitkack 2y ago

Life is already an analog computer running on hardware (the universe). You could be correct that if life is using the hardware to the fullest extent, simulating it again would you a horrendous double virtualization penalty. We could already be living under that same double virt penalty. I think we have an outsized focus on free will, partly because free will is a trick played on us by evolution. It takes an exorbitant amount of effort to exercise anything close to what most people would consider free will and the phase lag is measured in hours if not years.

brookst 2y ago

I’m curious if you think plants, single-cell algae, or single-cell animals like amoebas will be simulatable?

monero-xmr 2y ago
But simulate-able how? Not like they would exist in reality, interacting with the rest of the universe
- brookst 2y ago
  Why not? Most simulations (flight sims, etc) include external stimulus.
  - monero-xmr 2y ago
    The universe cannot be simulated accurately