On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 11:11:47AM -0400, John Clark wrote: > On Mon, May 11, 2015 Russell Standish <li...@hpcoders.com.au> wrote: > > > > > > I should have written "No free will <= deterministic behaviour." > > (<= means "entailed by", not ≤). > > Nondeterministic systems needn't have free will. > > > > You say that no free will is caused by deterministic behavior, and > nondeterminism (randomness) need not have free will, so now that you've > told me what free will isn't it might be nice if you told me what in the > world "free will" is. Then after we agree on what the term means we can > debate if human beings or computers or anything has this property or not. >
Free will is the ability to do something stupid. Nonrational. That's it. I don't normally engage in discussions about free will, as too many people have nonsensical notions of what it is, including the notion that it just a meaningless sound made be flapping chunks of meat together. > > > > Og was seeing, and Laplace's daemon, which operates in a deterministic > > setting. > > > > As I said before, if the daemon tells Og what his prediction of Og's > behavior will be the situation is not deterministic, or at least it can not > be determined by the daemon, for that you'd need a mega-daemon. And then > things iterate. > No you don't. Because the system is deterministic (after all the whole premiss of this thread of conversation is dynamical chaos, which is a deterministic system), it doesn't matter what the daemon tells Og, Og will do what he was going to do anyway, as he is deterministic, and the daemon is deterministic. In order to get the effect that you're describing, you need a non-deterministic world, which happily we appear to live in, due in no small part to the FPI effect. Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
