[ExI] [Extropolis] Irrational mechanics, draft Ch. 6. Creative evolution toward quality. Also, the 2nd test flight of Starship and the OpenAI drama.

[Giulio Prisco]

<John: I don't think it's necessary to invoke retrocausal influences to
explain why we wouldn't feel like a puppet with somebody else pulling the
strings even if we were as deterministic as a cuckoo clock.>

I agree. It is not necessary to invoke retrocausal influences to explain
why we FEEL like we have free will. Wolfram's argument based on
computational irreducibility (the fastest way to know with certainty that
something will happen is to wait and see if it happens) explains this well
enough. But I still make a difference between feeling that we have free
will and actually having free will.

On Thu, Nov 30, 2023 at 9:29 PM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
>
> On Thu, Nov 30, 2023 at 2:29 AM Giulio Prisco <giulio at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>  >* "**A history can be really deterministic (that is, uniquely
>> determined) without being uniquely determined by an initial state.I have
>> many examples in mind, here is one. Think of the traveling salesman. He
>> goes from city 1 to city 2 ... to city N (or back to city 1 through all
>> other cities) following the global rule that the total distance (or, more
>> generally, the total cost) must be minimal. As you know, this is a hard
>> computational problem."*
>>
>
> In that case the minimal distance the salesman must travel is determined
> by the relative position of the cities the salesman must travel through.
> Yes, that is a hard computational problem but at least it is computational,
> not everything is. A better example would be a computer running a short
> simple program to find the first even number greater than 2 that is not the
> sum of two prime numbers and then stop. Will it ever stop? Nobody knows
> even though the computer is 100% deterministic. That's why you can be
> deterministic but not predictable. Even you can't always predict what you
> are going to do, there are even times where you are absolutely positively
> 100% certain you know what you're going to do, but when the time actually
> comes you end up doing something entirely different. So I don't think it's
> necessary to invoke retrocausal influences to explain why we wouldn't feel
> like a puppet with somebody else pulling the strings even if we were as
> deterministic as a cuckoo clock.
>
> John K Clark
>
>
>
>
>
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