[ExI] Everett worlds

[John Clark]

On Mon, Aug 17, 2020 at 3:11 AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

 >> If something caused you to do X rather than Y then you're a
>> deterministic machine regardless of whether you know what the cause was or
>> not.
>
>

*> Not if I am part of that something. *


I don't know what that means. You either did what you did for a reason or
you did what you did for no reason; I don't pretend that's a profound
statement but it's undoubtedly true. If you acted as you did for no reason then
most wouldconsider that to be a bad thing, we would say you were being un-
reasonable.

*> Perhaps we exist in both this reality and a "beyond" behind a Turing
> Oracle interface (see e.g.Physical (A)Causality by Karl Svozil) and our
> free will originates in the beyond. *


The beyond? I think it might be wise to explain what in the world is meant
by the term "free will" before you present a theory concerning its origin.
Other than a noise made by the mouth I know of only one definition of "free
will" that isn't complete gibberish, and almost nobody uses it; free will
is the inability to know for certain what we will do next before we do it.
A coin doesn't know which way it will fall until it falls, and a calculator
doesn't know how much 42 times 57 is before it's finished making the
calculation. But for some reason not many want to grant this mysterious
property called "free will" to a coin or a calculator. So we're back to
square one and the question remains, forget about where it came from what
does "free will" even mean? I don't demand a rigorous mathematical
definition, I'd be happy with just a general idea, a hint of what we're
talking about that is not full of self contradictions.

John K Clark
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