<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><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.><br><br>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.</div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Thu, Nov 30, 2023 at 9:29 PM John Clark <<a href="mailto:johnkclark@gmail.com">johnkclark@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></div></div><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Thu, Nov 30, 2023 at 2:29 AM Giulio Prisco <<a href="mailto:giulio@gmail.com" target="_blank">giulio@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr"><br></div><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr"><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"> <span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">><i> "</i></span><i>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.<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">"</span></i></div></blockquote><div><br></div><font size="4">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.</font></div><div class="gmail_quote"><font size="4"><br></font></div><div class="gmail_quote"><font size="4"><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">John K Clark </span><br></font><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div> </div></div></div>
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