[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: feeling is the most important thing in the world, or at least that's the way I feel.>

So do I! We agree on something!

<being determined by the external environment...>

My whole point is that we are determined by the global whole of which we are an irreducible part, but not by the *external* environment (the rest of the world without us).

<You would remain uniquely determined by initial conditions in the far past even if retro causality turned out to exist>

Not so, unless you add that the initial conditions in the far past are partly determined by your thoughts and actions here and now. This sounds seriously retrocausal, so I guess it is better to avoid speaking of causality (which is not a condition for science, as Bertrand Russell was one of the first to realize) and speak only of correlations spread all over spacetime. Wittgenstein docet.

<I like to think that my actions were not Random and that I always had a reason for them, but I have to admit that just like everybody else sometimes I do things for no reason, sometimes I am UNreasonable.>

I guess at times random (as far as we can tell atm) quantum events in your brain get amplified to the macroscopic world and constitute "atoms of free choice" (ref. Penrose) out of which the macroscopic phenomenon that is your free agencies emerge.
And here's to unreasonable irrationality! It's the stuff of which dreams are made before becoming facts. Irrational mechanics!

--
Giulio Prisco
https://linktr.ee/giulioprisco
giulioprisco at protonmail.ch

On Friday, December 1st, 2023 at 1:49 PM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 1, 2023 Giulio Prisco <giulio at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> "I still make a difference between feeling that we have free will and actually having free will."
>
> If feeling is not involved then I have no idea what "free will "means. And feeling is the most important thing in the world, or at least that's the way I feel.
>
>>>"To me, actually having free will means not being uniquely determined by the rest of the world."
>
> If you were not determined by anything in the world then you were not determined at all, and there is a word for that sort of thing, random. Actually, being determined by the external environment is not necessarily a bad thing, after all that's the reason we have eyes and the reason we don't constantly walk into walls, we are determined to walk around them and not try to walk through them.
>
>>> "So, in a universe where Laplacian determinism holds, I don't have free will because I am uniquely determined by initial conditions in the far past. "
>
> You would remainuniquely determined by initial conditions in the far past even if retro causality turned out to exist, which I very much doubt.
>
>>> "In a universe where only what I call libertarian determinism holds, but not Laplacian determinism, I have free will because I'm an irreducible part of the whole."
>
> Regardless of what eventually turns out to be true, you must be an irreducible part of the whole, UNLESS your actions were random. I like to think that my actions were not Random and that I always had a reason for them, but I have to admit that just like everybody else sometimes I do things for no reason, sometimes I am UNreasonable.
>
> John K Clark See what's on my new list at [Extropolis](https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis)
> iau
>
>>> 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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