???
Like I said, ‘free will’ is an illusion. It is thus not exercised at all. Since ‘will’ is an outcome of the ‘self’ and the ‘self’ is an illusion, then in turn ‘will’ and ‘free will’ are also illusions.
I wonder if it is possible to write a board-bot that cruises message boards and uses a Dada Engine to generate random replies.
Would this board-bot have free will if it were truly random?
Sorry, I misread you what wrote.
That which is all has all. Unfree and Free are perceptions, thus equally correct and incorrect. Consciousness is not limited to one or the other, those things don’t make sense. It can perceive itself as having free will because it does. It is a slave to its will.
If you are going to insist on asserting “P and not P,” you will have to understand that people round here aren’t going to line up to congratulate you on the cogency of your reasoning. Pretty please, in the future, stop trying to say vague, muddled things in order to sound important; I get enough of this from my freshman philosophy students.
I congratulate the programmers of contentless on a fine effort at building a Turing machine which sounds almost like it understands what you say to it.
Side question(s) that have inevitably arisen/I have chosen to ask because of some of the posts in this thread:
Do we know if Quantum effects are in fact truly random, or is it just that we can’t detect the very small differences in initial states that lead to different results?
Do we even know the answer to that question?
If not, will it ever be possible to know?
Is there actually any difference between something being truly random and it being impossible to know if it’s truly random or not?
Did that last sentence even make any sense?
They are as random as the word ‘random’ can possibly mean. Uncertainty is a fundamental feature of the universe. For example, the EPR experiment(s) demonstrate that if we measure a particle’s spin along one axis, its spin along another axis is absolutely random: it is not even the case that it has such a spin which we just don’t happen to know about (a ‘hidden variable’).
The verified experiments of Aspect and others support such knowledge as strongly as any in science.
You must examine what is meant by the word ‘random’. The spin along an axis has a 50% probability of being positive and 50% of being negative, rather like a coin toss. Unlike a coin toss, however, there is no means even in principle whereby we could predict the outcome. If there were some hidden mechanism, Bell’s inequality and Aspect’s experiments would have shown so in the statistics.
How are you so sure of this?
If Einstein was right, and the variables are “there all along” but somehow hidden, then the detectors in the 3-variable (usually 3 axes of polarisation) experiment would agree 50% or more of the time. They consistenly agree less than 50% of the time: Einstein’s hidden variables must be wrong. The universe must be non-local (or some equally bizarre alternative formulation - see “possible loopholes”).
OK, but that’s a far cry from “Uncertainty is a fundamental feature of the universe. … it is not even the case that it has such a spin which we just don’t happen to know about (a ‘hidden variable’).”. How do you get that?
Because the experiments show the “realistic” local hidden variable hypothesis being violated: the realist curve is not observed, the “quantum weird” curve is. Uncertainty is a fundamental feature of the universe, according to any experiment ever verified.
OK, thanks for that.
So essentially what you’re saying is that we know for sure the universe is not deterministic in the way that most people would mean it. (If the exact same Big Bang happened again, with the exact same starting conditions, it would be massively unlikely that the universe would end up the same as it is now, right?)
So that leaves us with two choices. Either the underlying randomness is completely random and an illusion of free will somehow emerges from it OR the randomness isn’t actually random and is in fact somehow controlled by something else, whether you call that something God, the Soul, Narrativium, or whatever else you fancy.
I’m not really sure where I’m going with this, just trying to get things straight in my head more than anything…
Yes, but most people use the word incorrectly. Something can still be deterministic (ie having no ‘will’ element) without being determinable, ie. predictable. Not being able to predict next year’s weather does not give it a ‘will’.
Well, I don’t think the Big Bang happened so much as it exists and we’re living in it now, but yes: quantum events are not predictable even in theory. It is not that we don’t happen to know enough decimal places of accuracy, but that we cannot.
quote]Either the underlying randomness is completely random and an illusion of free will somehow emerges from it
[/quote]
Yes, it really is as ‘random’ as the word can possibly mean, and the illusion of free will (ie. the output of decisions having both a calculated element and a random element) arises from the fact that our everyday world tends towards predictability, which an organism must be “clever” enough to compute and predict but flexible enough (via the random element) not to enter some infinite loop because it can’t do anything else.
“Realist” is an arrogant way of saying ‘expected’. This does not lead to uncertainty as fundamental.
Well, I can only direct you towards the overwhelming evidence which supports Heisenberg’s fundamental principle, and assure you that I’d be the loudest applauder at the Nobel award ceremony which recognised your achievement in showing that uncertainty is not so fundamental.
Again, there’s a difference between a human unable to ever know with certainty and the universe being fundamentally uncertain. If there isn’t, you’ll need to prove that.
Ok, sorry.
Dont think SM needs to prove it. It has already been proved by others.