Posts for RGamma


1 2
12 13
Post subject: Re: Any female/girl TASers here?
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 2/3/2013
Posts: 320
Location: Germany
HappyLee wrote:
I don't know if it's a silly question to ask, but after using search I haven't found any similar topic, so pardon me for starting one. All TASers who I'm familiar with appear to be male (please correct me if I'm wrong). But it's ridiculous to believe that TASing is a man's game, since girls play video games too. I'm just curious to know if there are female TASers here who have made remarkable work, or what's the proportion of girls on TASVideos? For guys coming into this topic, one extra question: How do your girlfriends or wives or close female friends see or understand what you're doing? Do girls like watching TASes or people making TASes?
Welcome to a nerd corner of the internet. You can expect <=5% girls. It's like this with basically anything that has its roots before the web 2.0 (when the web became mainstream), like IRC, old gaming communities and really anything that is aimed at technical audiences. You also find this phenomenon heavily in academia like in courses that include computer science, physics, engineering, etc. These 3 disciplines have among the lowest participation of women overall. This trend obviously continues in the workplace. You better come to terms with this fact. Don't expect to meet any girls in these parts of the internet anytime soon.
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 2/3/2013
Posts: 320
Location: Germany
18:03:14 Nach | Mothrayas: I think RGamma needs to be tied up by spaghetti bots 18:03:20 Mothrayas | I can agree with this 18:04:08 Nach | 4 Spaghetti bots each take an arm/leg of RGamma and begin to tie him down 18:04:45 Nach | A 5th Spaghetti bot approaches to tie spaghetti around RGamma's neck and choke him to death. What will RGamma do? 18:05:11 Nach | Will RGamma survive? 18:05:44 RGamma | That is a question I will answer when I am professor of quantum philosophy 18:05:57 Nach | RGamma must flex and chew, but it looks like it might be too late! 18:06:10 RGamma | Nach: Wait 18:06:14 Nach | The 5th Spaghetti bot begins placing the Spaghetti on RGamma's neck 18:06:23 RGamma | Nach: Is this just an elaborate play to prepare me for a ban xDDDDD 18:06:25 Nach | There is no wait, it's now or never 18:06:32 Nach | Will RGamma survive? 18:06:37 RGamma | Yes!!! 18:06:41 Nach | How 18:06:42 Nach | ? 18:07:08 RGamma | He quickly evolves a new bone that made his mouth stretchy like a snake's 18:07:14 RGamma | and he just ate all the spaghetti 18:07:31 Nach | The Spaghetti bots momentarily confused regroup and begin applying twice as much Spaghetti than before 18:07:35 RGamma | His entire jaw was quickly evolutionarily modified 18:07:43 RGamma | A process known as spontaneous evolution 18:07:47 Nach | and 5 additional Spaghetti bots enter the kitchen in order to quicken the job 18:08:12 Nach | The Spaghetti bots are now applying Spaghetti faster than RGamma can chew 18:08:15 Nach | What will RGamma do? 18:08:56 RGamma | And in second step RGamma evolves another organ system very quickly, a superfast digestive tract compared with superquick oxygen resoption via the skin 18:09:22 Nach | RGamm continue to evolve, but it doesn't help with chewing through all that Spaghetti 18:09:35 Nach | The Spaghetti bots are applying their evil Spaghetti ropes faster and faster 18:09:42 Nach | Things don't look good for RGamma 18:10:24 Nach | The Spaghetti bets around RGamma's neck begin to choke him out. RGamma has 15 seconds before he passes out 18:10:40 Nach | Will MemoryTAS intervene? 18:10:54 RGamma | As a final evolutionary step RGamma evolves into a conscious spaghetti that all the other lower spaghettis adhere to. And the now enlightened lower spaghettis turned | against their masters in what is known the Battle Of The Sentient Spaghetti 18:11:19 RGamma | And then everything became Spaghetti 18:11:20 MemoryTAS | I take one piece of spaghetti, eat it, and walk away 18:11:36* Nach | In a shocking twist of events, MemoryTAS does not intervene to any real extent, but RGamma tries to become the great Spaghetti 18:12:01 RGamma | I am Spaghetti, just a higher evolved form 18:12:12 Nach | The Spaghetti bots begin to worship RGamma, but RGamma in turn worships the great Spaghetti monster known as Masterjun. The end.
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 2/3/2013
Posts: 320
Location: Germany
17:53:54 RGamma | feos: Do you understand what a fork is? 17:54:17 feos | do you understand what upstream is
Wikipedia wrote:
In software engineering, a project fork happens when developers take a copy of source code from one software package and start independent development on it, creating a distinct and separate piece of software. The term often implies not merely a development branch, but also a split in the developer community, a form of schism.
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 2/3/2013
Posts: 320
Location: Germany
eatyourvegetables wrote:
I'm having difficulties compiling lsnes on Ubuntu 16.10. Basically I know nothing about compiling and the inner workings but have managed to compile several libraries using step-by-step dummy-friendly instructions. Unfortunately the manual.txt included in the source is way too advanced for me. Can someone give pointers in how to successfully compile lsnes? I need it for snes and with lua support.
Come to IRC (https://webchat.freenode.net/), and type "/q RGamma", then we can chat and I can guide you.
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 2/3/2013
Posts: 320
Location: Germany
creaothceann wrote:
http://tasvideos.org/2608M.html archive.org links don't work?
The item is no longer in my library. Don't know what happened. I got no notice of this. Writing a mail is all I can do. Recreating the item will probably get it deleted again as I suspect this is some copyright issue maybe with the soundtrack or the game itself.
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 2/3/2013
Posts: 320
Location: Germany
What program and version are you even talking about?
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 2/3/2013
Posts: 320
Location: Germany
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 2/3/2013
Posts: 320
Location: Germany
Hello Plamondonl7000, welcome to the community. Your run is significantly slower than [560] NES Adventure Island by nesrocks in 37:01.37 in the same category. Please only actually submit runs that you deem compliant with the movie rules: Wiki: MovieRules (specifically that "A speed-oriented movie must beat all existing records") to avoid it getting rejected for technical/formal reasons. If you merely want to present or discuss your work you can do this on the forums. The current published TAS of this game is quite old. Maybe you could seek to improve it?
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 2/3/2013
Posts: 320
Location: Germany
Odongdong wrote:
I just did that again, but it's the same. I'm trying this in entirely different computer, even.
Can't reproduce. Does this still happen when you're using a stock browser with no plugins behind no proxy? Any login/session troubles with other sites?
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 2/3/2013
Posts: 320
Location: Germany
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 2/3/2013
Posts: 320
Location: Germany
feos wrote:
RGamma wrote:
In fact I'd appreciate a Nach or adelikat post here concerning general guidance.
When we met in person with moozooh last winter, he told me about the problem: Nach wants to run linux-driven things, probably comparable with what is used now, and adelikat wants to use C# and co. It could be run on linux, but the concept would be totally different.
The C# runtime is being ported to Linux: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2016/06/27/announcing-net-core-1-0/, but this is still unfinished I presume. I'm also all for keeping all things Linux/BSD and there's considerable choice there (there's even Rust web frameworks now, or Haskell ones. Two languages that'll have a great future I presume).
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 2/3/2013
Posts: 320
Location: Germany
Derakon wrote:
PHP is possibly the worst language in common use today. Sure it has a lot of pre-existing "solutions" that you can leverage if you use it. But plenty of other frameworks written in actually good languages also have a similar, if perhaps not quite as extensive, body of work. And the work that your developers put in to integrate those solutions into your website will go much more smoothly if you aren't working in PHP. Honestly I'd say just go with Django. It's written in Python, which is an easy-to-learn language with much stronger design fundamentals than PHP. Is Python perfect? No, but no language is, and the ways in which Python is imperfect are mostly matters of personal taste (like semantically relevant whitespace, or lack of strong typing) rather than objectively bad decisions. And Django is easy to set up, easy to "graduate" from a local page to a webserver, and popular enough to have lots of support and help online.
I second this. Django is very actively developed and has good deployment options and general compatibility and I have dabbled in it a bit for a simple customer management software (that I never finished, but still). I think there even are BB applications for it now (I have never tested them. In theory we could continue to run this forum separately having it only communicate via the database). I quite frankly hate Python's type system when used for more complicated applications, because it makes you put expectations about types into comments making them uncheckable automatically (Python's new type hinting reduces this somewhat but there needs to be good infrastructure for that (i.e. it needs to be supported in Django itself)) and defensively programming becomes quite nasty generally (how do you catch runtime errors concerning types without big preludes at the start of every function or exception madness, Django's debugger can help here though). I know adelikat is in the web dev business, but don't know what software they use and if we could too. In fact I'd appreciate a Nach or adelikat post here concerning general guidance. P.S.: And yes, I'd be willing to put time into a new site.
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 2/3/2013
Posts: 320
Location: Germany
(Note: I don't know how messy this might get, and will look into this tomorrow myself if there are no answers then. If it's too messy, ignore it). I noticed a problem when playing L.A. Noire: Cole Phelps needs to interrogate a bus driver on duty whose route he inquires at the bus depot. Driving along the path in his car his partner remarks (all paraphrased) "This is taking forever." to which Phelps replies: "Chances are we're going to catch him half-way". Is this true? You can complicate this question a lot, so for simplification state the problem like this: Given a closed non-self-intersecting path C of length L > 0 in the two-dimensional reals, a fixed point d (the bus depot, Phelps's car's starting point), a point p = d moving at speed |v_p| <= l_p representing Phelps's car and a point b /= p representing the bus moving at speed |v_b| <= l_b and /= 0 (all points on the path; a (positive) negative value for the speed denotes (counter-) clockwise direction, both speeds are constant and bounded). What is the probability P(v_p, b, v_b) that Phelps encounters the bus b (that is p meets b) after having travelled at most L/2 distance from d? (oh, and assume they're never travelling in the same direction at the same speed if it helps) Edit: Added bounds on speeds.
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 2/3/2013
Posts: 320
Location: Germany
Ready Steady Yeti wrote:
Maybe we should have a topic for memes/comics too?
Please no.... Everybody can just go visit xkcd, Penny Arcade, Cyanide and Happiness, etc themselves. If you're going to create one though, link to the sites where these are published and make it an informational topic.
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
Post subject: Re: Just a funny comic I found, relating to my knowledge of RAM.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 2/3/2013
Posts: 320
Location: Germany
Ready Steady Yeti wrote:
How is this a topic? Please use the forums only for things that are discussable (or informational) or, if not, create a thread akin to http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5084 (i.e. a "supertopic"). Also, xkcd comics really should be linked to with their alt-text, which is half the joke...
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
Post subject: Re: Endings
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 2/3/2013
Posts: 320
Location: Germany
Ready Steady Yeti wrote:
Does a TAS of a game with no real actual credits ending count? Like for LEGO Friends, I am guessing that 100% doesn't really have an ending, and the game just will go on even after the last task in 100% is done. So would this run be automatically rejected for not having an ending if in 7 years or whatever it was submitted? Many DS games apparently don't really have endings, or good endings at least.
This is not a problem. See http://tasvideos.org/MovieRules.html#MovieMustBeComplete. Several score-based A2600 games have the same issue you're describing, see for instance http://tasvideos.org/2599M.html, which simply ends when the high score is reached. Your run would simply end when all objectives for 100% are completed. You shouldn't show a screen to prove this in the main submission; instead you may also provide a movie file/encode that does show the completion stats, if applicable (the shorter one would be used for publication though).
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 2/3/2013
Posts: 320
Location: Germany
Post a thread with everything you found and the specific problem you have. The more specific, the more likely you are to find help. Yes, this costs time and seems like unnecessary overhead (esp. if no-one comes forward) but it might well be worth it.
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 2/3/2013
Posts: 320
Location: Germany
Well, everyone's doing this on their own time, and we don't have a designated role of "TASer adjunct" or what have you, so the best way to get help with a game is to either know someone who would be interested (which kind of bites itself in the tail if you need to put your plan out there first) or post a thread with a couple WIPs and documentation (the more you found and the better you present that info the better) or ask someone of the RTA/unassisted community (SRL, SDA) via one of their channels whether someone has experience with or interest in the game/run. The 2nd way is probably the most solid and a good thing to do either way. If you get stuck and can break down your specific problem far enough that someone would be willing to take up that now hopefully relatively small task (including help with scripting, system internals or mathematical optimization), chances are someone will notice and assist. And of course do your own research as there might be a detailed walkthrough on sites like GameFAQ or similar.
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 2/3/2013
Posts: 320
Location: Germany
Yeah, I've raised the consequentialist point as well, but it's kind of a cheap way out in a topic like this. Let's evolve it a bit: What do you think about the mind body problem? To me this is a much more pressing issue than the free will one and it'd be very hard to grasp that the mind could be a mere illusion as well (esp. considering the "inner voice"). In fact, I haven't heard one convincing argument about how mind and body relate (and if you make no distinction, like it is (attempted to be) done in modern times, what then are thoughts?). If it could be shown that the inner voice is simply another form of activation of the speech centre and as such part of experience, what is experience? Any attempt at explanation simply shoves the issue sideways with no plausible explanations where mind and physics connect.
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 2/3/2013
Posts: 320
Location: Germany
feos wrote:
RGamma wrote:
In the case of "no free will" both are devoid of any original agency by definition, yet this does not have necessary behavioral implications, since the sense of agency will still be there, which is what drives the almost axiomatic believe in free will today. It would simply mean that whatever any of them does is a matter of circumstances, including any thoughts and any attitudes, on a fundamentally physical level.
1. Where is this obsession - to explain the entire with a part of it - always coming form? Can't people just get it that the world is diverse? 2. What exactly is "original agency"?
1. By principle of induction. You start with a basic collection of elements and operations and then you build a new collection by first putting the elements in, then applying operations to the elements and adding them in as well, and repeat. If you can reason about the original elements and operations, you can find that all elements hereby added to the collection have limitations about them that arise from the things you started with. You can also apply this in a more lax fashion by arguing that if you make a whole out of deterministically behaving and interacting parts then the whole must also be deterministic as defined by the behavior of its parts. This is arguing, not proving, but the idea stays the same. 2. The disposition to make truly free choices.
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 2/3/2013
Posts: 320
Location: Germany
feos wrote:
RGamma wrote:
Meaning as an organizing principle of thought and desire would not be affected by disproving free will. But that would reveal that we're essentially no more than rocks floating in space (elaborate rocks, but rocks nonetheless).
That's basically what I find silly. And the actual question you're raising is, what would be the difference between a human that is the primary author of his decisions, and the one that's entirely ruled by the circumstances. Is it right? In my opinion, both exist in reality. Some people want to drive their own lives in some way, others just rely on the circumstances and let them command what choices the human should make. So the former have will for actions, and the latter don't care. Still, I see no point in discussing how free that will is, since it can't be 100% random. But it has randomness to it, so it's not 100% deterministic either. Maybe in fact, it's a matter of measure?
In the case of "no free will" both are devoid of any original agency by definition, yet this does not have necessary behavioral implications, since the sense of agency will still be there, which is what drives the almost axiomatic believe in free will today. It would simply mean that whatever any of them does is a matter of circumstances, including any thoughts and any attitudes, on a fundamentally physical level. The "no free will" case doesn't rule out any of these types of people to exist, it merely rules out that there has been an original choice via a "magic" (devoid of utterly determining factors) mechanism that lead to their attitudes and actions, small and large. In fact, no kind of reaction to having no free will will lead you to gain more true agency, since the unfreeness is ingrained in your very existence and independent of any thought processes or decisions. And it is at this fundamental level, where determinacy and randomness play a role, that it could leave open the possibility for some sort of freedom in choice, not whether subjectively (with your limited mind) you can't explain in cognitive concepts why someone behaves in this or that way or whether you find it "random" like what Jim Carrey does.
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 2/3/2013
Posts: 320
Location: Germany
Your last passage is the "ignorance is bliss" point I agreed with in that it wouldn't change our conduct since the processes ruling our behavior are not within our immediate mental grasp and as such we wouldn't be aware of them right there and then anyway. Meaning as an organizing principle of thought and desire would not be affected by disproving free will (in fact, none of our cognitive concepts would, since they're all instances of the brain's machinery and therefore inevitable). But that would reveal that we're essentially no more than rocks floating in space (elaborate rocks, but rocks nonetheless). Whether there's something more (meaning) to the existence of the universe as an inquiry isn't affected by the free will debate, so I take the "ultimately meaningless" back.
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 2/3/2013
Posts: 320
Location: Germany
feos wrote:
I can't make sense of your second part of the post. All I know is that ability to choose itself is tied to will. And will depends on things I described. The choice always has reasons. If someone knew everything, he would also know what choices people will make, since they have reasons, it's just not limited to known things. But for a person who makes the choice, it's usually not known for sure, whether what he chooses is better or worse. There can only be presumptions (that might be logical to some extent, but no guarantees). If the above means to you that free will does not exist at all, well, ok. But I'm actually free in what I decide, since I have this ability to actually chose anything. However, I don't even know why "free will" is such a big deal. I always try to find the most productive reasons to rule my will whenever I'm about to choose something. Then again, that's my will to choose those reasons for my actions. It's based on my priorities, and priorities are based on what brings me pleasure (and different kinds of pleasure also have priorities). I don't see how having reasons (that one still can choose too) means absolute determinism and no free will. But whatever. In conclusion, since whoever makes the choice can't be 100% sure about the outcome, here's your randomness. It's not objectively random, but it's random for a person who doesn't have all the information. And since reality depends on what he chooses, voilà, subjective randomness spawns in the objective world.
There is a big semantic gap between the level on which I am trying to argue (for which I'd need a much more rigorous and technical jargon) and the high-level concepts you describe, so I wouldn't be surprised if my argument feels disconnected. You're right in saying that completely disproving free will would not necessarily change our conduct and the associated experience, esp. since such an argument would be highly technical and out of immediate mental grasp anyway (ignorance is bliss, isn't it), which seems like a good point and I agree (although some philosopher might go mad somewhere :)). "However, I don't even know why 'free will' is such a big deal" I see it as the final bastion against the complex, but cold and ultimately meaningless, world that physics has revealed to us. We may be ruled by all kinds of fundamental forces in our universe that we have no control over and which we only exist at the mercy of, but it is hoped that there is something that is not part of of this machinery, a cog that defies expectations so to speak.
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 2/3/2013
Posts: 320
Location: Germany
feos wrote:
I don't know why you think having free will means being unpredictable. One can be unpredictable, but that couldn't happen too frequently, because not all the time there are circumstances that would allow that. To illustrate, here's an example of an action, that most people couldn't predict
If anyone was, with 100% certainty, predictable all the time this is my point 1 and we're done. It doesn't matter that people can't predict what's going to happen in that video, because our mental capabilites are severely limited and nobody could run a mental simulation of all the particles/cells/neurons in Jim's body in real time and map these back into actions.
feos wrote:
The problem is, we will never know, because there can not be a computer or a machine that accounts for everything. You can be improving it by adding new features to it, that let it consider new facts, but you don't know all the facts either! Instead of making an omni-aware machine, you at some point will say: "Uh, I'm tired of doing this for 50 years.Let it burn already." About decisions themselves. Elsewhere I said that decisions are always based on something. In the example above it's based on trusting such an impulse and knowing no disadvantages of trusting it. Or ignoring such disadvantages. If it's some good impulse, then it still matters how hard the choice is. But yes, any choice relies on something, be it physical reality or one's beliefs. But it also depends on priorities. Which might depend on literally everything in one's life, consciously or subconsciously. And so, you can't predict one's decisions perfectly, because there's no way to know all priorities of a man. Now what if there was such an ability - ability to build an omni-aware machine? I think it would be able to predict everything. Would it mean people will stop having free will to choose? I don't think so. Interestingly, priorities are not exactly what forces one to make a decision, but rather stimulate him: depending on your decision, factors that you consider important will be satisfied, which in most cases leads to you yourself also being satisfied. That might lead to someone else being abused though, so morality is another aspect that's involved. Note: a decision to ignore other's morality principles in order to satisfy his own priorities is a moral decision anyway. I don't think it answers any of your questions, but my idea is that the world is absolutely complex, so there's no way to check if free will physically exists or not.
This is why I built up my argument from simpler physical principles. It is enough to show that deterministic physical laws govern all parts (it doesn't matter to what abstraction level your go here as long as the general behavior of the entire structure can be accounted for, for instance you could argue on the level of molecules or cells or neurons) whose mutual connections make up our body, then any configuration of these parts is equally deterministic. In presence of non-deterministic forces show that probabilistic influence is negligible (like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, atom decay or cosmic rays being generally negligible for the proper functioning of a circuit on Earth most of the time (but in case a glitch occurs in the circuit, you wouldn't say it has exerted free will, would you?)). If you showed that non-deterministic forces somehow are not negligible in our case, you aren't saved though, because then it could be said that free will doesn't exist either because a train of thought may be influenced by pure chance. Consider Conway's game of life. Even though the behavior of the cells can become quite sophisticated, it follows from just the rules on which it is based, that any state of the board has a predictable outcome. If you were to show someone a sequence from a Conway's game of life-like game, it may be difficult to predict the next state, but by simply knowing that every fundamental part of the game is predictable and all rules by which these are connected are predictable you can already positively answer the predictability question (even if these rules rely on results from chaotic maps or PRNGs or anything arbitrarily complicated you may or may not think of, such that the game appears "absolutely complex"), much like from reducing a formal system or process to a (much simpler) Turing-machine it follows that it is Turing-complete. Similarly fundamental results come from information theory (such as that no reversible compression algorithm can ever strictly reduce the size of all of its inputs (the space of algorithms is ridiculously large)). Here "predictable" includes "with high certainty". Even a Conway's game of life with very small probabilistic influence may still be modelled to high accuracy. To save free will you need two things: Non-determinism is not negligible when explaining the functioning of the mind and this probabilistic influence cannot be explained by anything outside the subject. It is not enough not being able to explain where impulses come from, after all their origin may not be in our immediate mental grasp (much like the next unknown prime number isn't, the problems we're dealing with here likely many many orders of magnitude more computationally intensive), and a reduction argument like one for Turing-completeness can show up fundamental limits regardless of whether we understand all the details.
Nach wrote:
Are you considering the ability of an outcome to be included in the definition of free will, or only the thought or desire of a particular outcome? They are not the same, as not every action comes to fruition.
Desire is not necessary. It matters only that in principle you could have chosen differently and no complete functional description of you can fully explain the choice you made. The matter of free will goes much deeper than what my definition seems to suggest, so I want to draw attention to the question I edited in later: Can you control what you think? In a sense it is assumed that at any moment you're given the choice to think about something else (which is synonymous with being in control of one's though process), although these choices are not presented externally. What then is the guiding principle behind how thoughts are "chosen" (how they occur)? They clearly can be influenced by external substances or illness, and clearly you don't need to think about what to think before you think it, because that leads to an infinite regress. The simulation hypothesis seems interesting, but I don't think it leads to much progress on this topic considering that we assume a fixed universe implicitely in this discussion, whether simulated or not.
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
Post subject: Do you believe in (a version of) free will?
Experienced Forum User
Joined: 2/3/2013
Posts: 320
Location: Germany
I assume this definition of free will: The ability to -given multiple courses of action- choose any of them, whereby the choice is not fully explained by the circumstances in which it is made, that is the origin of the choice solely resides in the subject making it. I also assume that any fully deterministic physical system is computable (in the sense that there is a finite algorithm that can be evaluated in an unambiguous manner in finite time that can predict the single future state of a physical system given the state of that system and the laws of physics governing it). Also, this is just brainstorming, in practice one would have to be way more rigorous and careful obviously. Although I'd like to believe in (hope it to exist) free will (who wants to be fully described by a mere computation?), this seems difficult given the following observations/postulates (I'm a layman in many topics referenced, correct me if I'm wrong):
  1. If all constructs and interactions in our universe are deterministic and computable, free will is disproven, because then any combination of constructs within the universe may in principle be simulated (computed) to perfect degree in finite time, including all life forms, and any choice that does not fully and deterministically emerge from a previous computation is impossible.
  2. Parts of the currently known laws of physics include the possibility of true randomness (in the causation sense), that is some events may only be predicted statistically even if all (currently describable) circumstances are known (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_variable_theory and Bell's theorem in that article).
  3. A truly causally random process can not be computed, because ordinary computation can be fully explained causally by definition (see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics and https://www.quora.com/Is-the-universe-computable (first answer)).
  4. Even on a basis of indeterminism and (some) uncomputable laws of physics one can build deterministic devices in the macro sense (e.g. circuits), that are large enough to practically extinguish influence from supposedly truly random occurences like atom decay. A vast amount of scientific/engineering progress relies on this fact.
  5. Life forms are entirely made out of the same building blocks physically (elementary particles or something else, depending on your model of physics).
  6. The simpler the life form, the more unfitting it is to say that it has free will (think about cells, bacteria and insects). In fact it may just behave like a circuit or cellular automaton.
  7. If simple building blocks of life forms and their interactions are shown to be deterministic, then any combination of them is also deterministic (at least in the macro sense).
  8. Our brains are made from cells functioning and interacting in a deterministic manner in the macro sense (like circuits) and no other mechanism can be attributed to the brain's functioning. The brain is the sole origin and seat of the mind (this is not required if the rest of the "seat" behaves in the manner described).
  9. Then the mind is deterministic (and computable to high precision) as well even though we may not comprehend the origin of our thoughts or actions: "Experience teaches us no less clearly than reason, that men believe themselves free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined." -- Spinoza.
  10. Thus free will is an illusion. Any deliberation on what action to take given a choice has an already determined single outcome the moment the incentive for making a choice is given, but the subject cannot comprehend the complex underlying mechanisms fully determining his deliberation, thus he believes himself free.
It's likely I have conflated terms where I shouldn't have and the argument structure is a bit wonky, but that's what your are for. In case of doubt, ask. Further problems: The mind body problem: How can a mind emerge from a fully physical system? Is the mind an illusion (or would free will being an illusion imply this or vice versa)? Assume that truly random and computationally undescribable problems do significantly govern our behavior. Would this enable free choice or would free choice merely be a probabilistic phenomenon? Is our mind capable of hypercomputation in some sense (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercomputation, it clearly is at least Turing-complete ignoring memory constraints)? If not, does this mean that it is Turing-computable (at most Turing-complete) and does this imply physical determinism? Or do thought processes not fit any known class of computational power, that is are current notions of computability sufficient or even applicable? How do you solve the problem of who controls deliberation when faced with a choice and how (how is a choice made if not not randomly (deterministically) and not truly randomly either)? Where does free will start? Is it quantifiable? A lot of ground could be gained by answering the questions: Can you control what you think? If so, how? If not, does this leave a place for free will regardless? P.S. I'm not satisfied with this post yet and will probably edit it later.
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
1 2
12 13